


The Only Stillness

by Major



Category: Prodigal Son (TV 2019)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Friendship, Getting Together, Love, Misunderstandings, Nightmares, Pining, Trapped
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:35:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27509944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Major/pseuds/Major
Summary: It’s Malcolm’s job to see everything.  Somehow, he still doesn’t see Edrisa coming.
Relationships: Malcolm Bright/Edrisa Tanaka
Comments: 51
Kudos: 131
Collections: Fic In A Box





	The Only Stillness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CousinShelley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CousinShelley/gifts).



The case was solved. The bad guy was caught. Nobody died. Malcolm boarded the elevator with Edrisa to leave the precinct and promptly screwed them both over by concluding that it was a good night, all things considered. A classic jinx.

The elevator jolted between floors with a nasty sounding creak, jittered under their feet, and stopped. The tension jacked up before the first second of silence passed.

“Don’t panic.”

The emergency button didn’t work. Maintenance didn’t patch in, and no helpful voice sent words of comfort and promises of a speedy rescue. That was unfortunate.

Edrisa had her back pressed hard against the wall. “Me? No. Not me. I’m calm. Don’t worry. I… I am going to die with a completely even heart rate. I won’t even scream when we start to plummet, and on impact? Tranquil Tanaka: that’s what the headline will be. She never even flinched.”

Malcolm tucked away a small smile and turned to her. “Tranquil Tanaka and Mellow Malcolm. They kept their cool until the end.”

Edrisa stood very still, her voice was even and quiet and sounded for all the world like someone in total control. “Bright.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m panicking.”

He let his smile out at the admission.

“I know. Let’s sit. We’re going to sit now, okay?” He took her hand and lowered himself down against the back wall of the elevator with her so it was slow and steady and she kept that outward cool that could prevent her from spiraling if he could help her maintain it. Everything was fine. The trick was to believe it even when it wasn’t true.

Four walls and a ceiling. Four walls and a whole lot of room between the floor and the ground below. He didn’t want her to feel nervous, so he didn’t stare. Instead, he relaxed against the wall so she would subconsciously mirror his movements as he often saw her doing and resorted to something that he knew she loved and appreciated in the same way he did even when it caught them looks from the others that separated them as oddballs: weird facts.

“Fear of elevators is very common, if unwarranted,” he assured her. “Seventeen thousand people get injured by elevators and escalators every year in the United States.”

Her brow furrowed, but she was still taking slow, measured breaths. That was good. He just needed to keep her mind moving while they were stuck.

“So we’ll only be two in seventeen thousand,” she concluded. “We’ll die gruesomely and no one will remember us.”

“No, that many get injured, but only about thirty actually die.”

Her hands clasped and unclasped the strap of her bag. “Great. Then we’ll make the news.”

“Oh, Ainsley would definitely cover it. People love elevator horror stories—but no! Not the point I was actually making. Seventeen thousand incidents, only thirty deaths. Our odds of survival are fantastic. So far we aren’t even injured, just trapped, and those other people didn’t have Gil or Dani or JT. Plus, me. You have me. And I would never let anything happen to you.”

She leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. “It wouldn’t really be in your control. Sure, sometimes I think of you as Superman because you’re handsome and nice and seem to always save the day, but to my knowledge you’re still actually of the human variety and humans don’t do well against quick drops from high places.”

Sure, if the elevator actually crashed, they were both bugs on windshields, but there was no need to bring reality into his attempt to keep her calm, especially when the odds were genuinely in their favor.

“I’d cushion your fall,” he promised.

“With what?”

“With me.”

He wasn’t wrangling her panic as well as he hoped. Edrisa’s breaths were coming shorter and faster, and her knuckles were tight and unyielding on her purse strap now.

She had to take a deep breath before replying, “I would take great comfort in that if you were the Marshmallow Man.”

It was safe to stare at her now with her eyes clenched tight since his close observation couldn’t upset her nerves when they were already frayed and she didn’t know he was inspecting her as closely as he was. A light sheen of sweat was forming on her forehead, and there was a barely detectable shake to the mounting tension in her stiff arms. He needed to cool off her fear before she had a full-blown anxiety attack or passed out. He didn’t want her to faint in there. They might need to make a quick exit when help did come, and that would be easier if she was awake.

“Take comfort in this,” he told her. “Despite what Hollywood would have you believe, there’s only been one occurrence of an elevator car free-falling from a snapped cable that was unrelated to fire damage or a total structural collapse, neither of which we have to worry about here. And that was seventy-five years ago! Most of the people who die are elevator technicians whose deaths are far more mundane. They fall through the elevator shafts. That’s not us. We are _temporarily_ trapped, not hurt, not dying, merely stuck in an uncomfortable but fully survivable, fleeting situation.”

“Fleeting.”

“Right.”

“Okay.”

She slumped sideways, and her head pressed against his shoulder. He took the opportunity of her leaning into his side to pat her hand and check her pulse on the sly. She was all right. It was quick, but someone would get them out soon. The hardest thing was patience and keeping their heads. His mother took shots at his partial sanity on occasion, but meditation kept him clear and he wasn’t worried. Except about Edrisa. He didn’t like the idea of her being afraid. He would minimize it for her as much as he could.

“Why do you know this stuff?” she asked without opening her eyes, and that was for the best. If she found a safe place in her mind to refocus her energy, it would only help her until they were rescued. “I like that you know it, but how come? Do a lot of people get pushed down elevators? I thought most of your factoids were murder related.”

Most of them were. That was the twisted truth and consequence of being a Whitley. Ainsley grew up to cover evil on the news. He grew up to get inside of it, pull it into himself, dream and become it when he had to in order to better understand a case.

“There’s been a few interesting elevator-adjacent murder mysteries,” he admitted. “But I’ve always been intrigued by crashes: elevators, cars, trains, planes, boats, roller coasters—you name it. It’s amazing what people can survive. And tragic what they really, really can’t.”

“That’s true,” she said, and his eyes narrowed on her hands. They’d loosened just a tiny bit on her purse strap, the knuckles regaining their color, her fingers not quite so rigid in their death grip. She was relaxing. Only a little bit and not nearly enough to set him at ease for her, but it made him regard her again—curious.

If she were anyone else, Gil, JT, his mother—God, his mother—even Ainsley, they’d be telling him to shut up about crashes altogether, and death and gruesome injuries while he was at it. Not Edrisa, though. He got oddball looks, but so did she. Because he and Edrisa were the same in this way: fascinated with the macabre, curious and distractible when it came to darker morbid truths.

He took a chance when it would have made it worse for anybody else and asked, “I could tell you about some of the worse cases if you want?”

Her right hand fell away from the purse strap altogether, and he grinned. “Okay.”

“Your choice. You want people who fell out of the sky, hit water, or went off the rails?”

Edrisa sat up and opened her eyes. They lit up, but it wasn’t with fear now but the spark of a resurfaced memory. “I once did an autopsy on a guy who fell out of a hot air balloon. It was like a human Rubik’s Cube, and none of the colors were where they were supposed to be. Do you know anything like that?”

Malcolm pointed at her. “You’re going to tell me about that. But first, let me tell you about Henry Fellowsworth whose parachute didn’t open when he miscalculated his skydiving jump and landed on a highway, only to be immediately hit by a semi.”

“Well, he didn’t live,” she guessed.

“Ah, but he did.”

Edrisa blinked in surprise and adjusted her glasses as she scooted closer and twisted sideways towards him to listen. Malcolm talked her through engine fails and broken tracks, flipped boats, nasty deaths and shocking survival stories, planes, trains, and automobiles. By the time a voice finally crackled through the speakers to check if they were okay, Malcolm jumped because Edrisa was in the middle of telling him all about Hot Air Balloon Man and he was concentrating so hard in fascination that he forgot where they were.

Edrisa was the one who hopped up and went to the intercom. “Hi! We’re okay. Can you get us out, though? I’m starving.”

They were saved without incident ten minutes later, and Malcolm took her to dinner so she could finish telling him about how she solved the human Rubik’s Cube. He didn’t realize how nice it had felt to speak animatedly without catching funny looks until the waiter overheard their conversation and made a grossed out face. Edrisa never looked at him like he was weird. He figured it was because they were both weird. When the waiter was gone, he asked her why the autopsy took so long to conclude if she solved his skeletal puzzle and had the very clear cause of death.

She leaned forward over the table with a smirk. “Because there were twenty-three extra bones.”

His eyebrows shot up, and he signaled to the waiter to come back. He didn’t want glasses of wine anymore. He wanted the bottle.

****

Edrisa turned to him at the curb as they left the restaurant and shot him a big smile.

“Thanks for dinner! And the chat.” Her nose crinkled in confusion. “You’d be surprised how many people get queasy discussing the finer parts of body reconstruction.”

He wouldn’t, actually. He’d encountered the same problem and similar many times. “I have an iron stomach.”

Her smile was back. “My treat next time. Not that I think there will be a next time. I just meant that this one time, now, was fun and in the event of a hypothetical next time in the future, I would be happy to pay. And chat more, but that’s free.”

“I had fun too,” he assured her and was surprised by how much he meant it. Most of his outings were full of dead bodies and mystery. He thrived on it, but there was something to be said for a quiet night with good wine and some like-minded company. “Let me get you a cab.”

She waved him off and took a step away. “No worries. I’ll take the subway.”

There were a lot of allowances he was willing to make for the sake of respecting other people’s choices, but he couldn’t let a woman take a subway alone this late at night in good conscience. They’d been trapped in that elevator too long and closed the restaurant with their conversation. He expressed that as delicately as he could, but she gave a snort of laughter.

“If you don’t like the subway, you should see the place where I’m staying.”

He didn’t like the sound of that, which was how he found himself in room 33 of the tiny, rundown motel on the bad side of the bad side of town. The Six wasn’t a sinkhole full of rats, which was about the only complimentary thing he could think when he stepped inside of it. Edrisa’s apartment was flooded as was the apartment below hers due to a mistake she made with a forgotten bubble bath, and she was paying for the damage to keep from being evicted. That led to an alternate living situation on a very tight budget in the meantime. It was times like these when Malcolm truly felt his wealth. It weighed on him like a blessing and shame at once.

He stopped his slow, awed turn as fireworks or gunshots went off somewhere nearby outside. Edrisa flinched but smiled through a shrug.

“Oh, you get used to that pretty quick. I sleep right through most of it. Except for the really big booms, which are either quarry noises or cannonballs. Undetermined.”

His eyebrows went up with no satisfaction at that answer. “This place… is not safe. You are not staying here.”

She rocked back on her heels. “Well, I am. But it’s just for now.”

“It’s just for never. Pack your bag. You’re staying with me until your apartment is ready. I have the space and the inclination to help a friend in need. And you”—he leaned closer to the wall at what he was certain was a poorly hidden peephole—“are in need specifically of space. Please accept. I have trouble sleeping as it is. If I have to think of you staying here when my father’s prison cell is nicer, I’ll have to go back on sedatives to achieve REM. A ‘yes’ would do me the favor.”

She tilted her head at the sudden loud screech from next door that was either a wail of pleasure or pain or some mysterious mix of the two. “Uh, then here.” She dug into her pocket and held out an invisible prize. “Your ‘yes’.”

Malcolm swiped it from her open palm. “No takebacks.”

It was with relief and a welcoming open arm that he led her into his apartment when they escaped the The Six’s shady neighborhood. She stepped inside almost reluctantly, and was all eyes as she got a look at the loft. It was her uncertainty in the entrance that made him want to slap his forehead for not offering sooner.

“If you’d be more comfortable, I’d be happy to put you up at a hotel.” One with a higher thread count for its sheets than its average nightly death toll.

She looked away from her casual observations to stare at him with a pinched face and a shake of her head.

“Are you sure? Because I come from very old money and have almost nothing to do with it since my main hobby is murder, and I get all of those I could ever want for free.”

She waved hello to Sunshine when she caught sight of the bird sitting in her cage.

“Until you run out and have to hire a hitman for entertainment.” She spun around and pointed at him. “Don’t do that.”

He raised three fingers. “Scouts honor. But are you sure about the hotel? I want you to be comfortable, and I really don’t mind.”

She shook her head again. “Crashing on a friend’s couch is one thing. Accepting that much money from you…”

“I understand.” People got weird about money. He probably would too if he hadn’t grown up with so much of it. Or maybe he was the weird one about money because of his privilege. Either way, he was happy to have her, and her preference was no trouble to him. “Well, I’d offer you the bed, but I require the restraints. And on that subject, I should warn you, there will probably be screaming while you’re here. You might be begging for that hotel room after a couple of nights with me.” She mumbled something in response, but he only caught ‘hotel’ and ‘with you’. “Sorry?”

“Nothing!” She came over and took the bag from his hand that he carried up for her. “Do you have somewhere I can change? I’m beat.”

He looked up later after restraining one of his wrists to the bed at the sound of Edrisa’s chortle. She pointed at her mouth where she stood in red shorts and a Wonder Woman pajama top.

“We both wear night guards.” Her words were muffled in a funny way as she pointed at the one he’d already popped into his own mouth. She explained her own, “TMJ.”

He pointed to his own mouth and spoke around the guard, “Night terrors.”

“Cool.” Her eyes widened. “Not cool! Just. You know. Twins.”

He grinned, and she grinned back. Her own guard was bright pink, and his smile softened fondly.

“Good night, Bright.”

“Good night, Edrisa.”

She shuffled off to the couch, and he restrained his other wrist before falling back against the pillows and waiting for another long night of struggling for enough decent sleep to make it through the day tomorrow without too many hallucinatory mishaps. Maybe it was the very long day he’d had, chasing down a killer, wrapping up a case, getting trapped in an elevator, and experiencing the inside of a room at The Six with the knowledge that a friend had been sleeping in that deathtrap for days, but he woke up the next morning surprised and happy. He’d slept through the night, and judging by the delicious smells wafting from the kitchen, Edrisa had made him a thanks-for-the-hospitality breakfast. Impressive, considering his refrigerator was more barren than Antarctica. He saved her from being murdered, and she made him hash browns and coffee. Everything evened out.

****

Edrisa liked weapons.

On her second night there, he showed her his collection of axes, and she told him about the cadaver that went missing in med school and the two guys who got expelled when it was found propped up in the courtyard dressed like a scarecrow with an ax in its hand on Halloween. She swung one and broke a vase on accident. He chopped the ax through one on purpose to make her feel better and poured more wine.

****

Malcolm got home earlier than usual and loosened his tie as he made his way over to the couch to sit. He decided not to flip the TV on until he found out if Edrisa was busy working first. She had a nest set up: a big tumbler with an orange silly straw sticking out of it with a purple coaster that he didn’t recognize sitting on the coffee table, a green fleece blanket in a messy heap, and her laptop set up across from it. He glanced at the screen and hesitated when the first thing that popped out at him was his own name.

“Uh, Edrisa,” he started when he heard her come back into the room.

“Oh, hey! You’re home!” She flopped down next to him into her soft blanket nest. “Did you want to watch TV? What are you in the mood for? Horror movie? Rom-com? Horror rom-com? Like most of my blind dates.”

She chuckled as she passed him the remote from the arm of the couch. He took it, but his eyes were still on her laptop screen.

“Sure, but what are you looking at and why is my name in that article?” He hoped it wasn’t another story on his father. He could change his name, but his DNA, his childhood, that stuff was inescapable and always following him around in print.

“Oh, it’s not an article. Not really, anyway. I’m on the forums. I think you must’ve come up again. I haven’t gotten to this post yet. You have a big following. Lots of fans.”

“Forums for what?” His skepticism quickly melted over into wariness. “And what do you mean ‘fans’?”

In his experience, being fans of someone’s work was harmless enough but large followings for particular people—and he did not qualify as a celebrity himself so the profile changed for the worse even more—quickly devolved towards stalking, rather than mundane admiration. The Whitlys were infamous. It was irritating enough dealing with the media without having anybody following him around that would become the groupie of a serial killer or his family. His dad still got marriage proposals from his own ‘fans’.

“It’s nothing bad,” she promised and pulled the computer onto her lap. She pointed the screen in his direction, and he scooted closer to see. “I’m on Web Sleuth, but my favorite is Justice Quest. Look.”

He squinted down as she scrolled through the true crime enthusiast sites. It was a bunch of amateur murder hobbyists inspecting clues on active cases, dissecting cold ones, and celebrating solved ones and the people who helped close them.

Edrisa pointed at one of her own comments with her smiling face on her avatar. “I’m DocHolmes on here if you want to find me. I’ve never been able to solve anything myself. I’m better at the assist than the detective-ing, I guess.”

“Then maybe you should have been DocWatson.”

Her laughter was quick and light and the freedom in it put him at ease about the whole thing. It was hard to imagine anything sinister coming from a place full of Edrisas.

“Who’s this guy?” he asked, pointing to a post that replied to one of hers. “And why did he call you… every name in the book?”

The worst book. A book that should be banned.

It was remarkable how easily people shed social conventions and resorted to childhood taunts and bullying online. A certain amount of dissociation kicked in and made otherwise normal people digitally cruel. He couldn’t imagine anyone calling Edrisa those things to her face and doubted that the specific man who did on Justice Quest would have the gumption to break social etiquette in person. Men who called women _those names_ on the internet tended to be cowards in real life. Anonymity and lack of consequences conditioned them to release their inner misogynist where the worst thing that could happen to them was getting banned from a particular online space. This guy was a real piece of work with a clear inferiority complex and hatred for women.

“Oh, that’s MoriAnarchy,” Edrisa explained. “He’s always like that. I tried blocking him before, but he just made a bunch of other accounts and spammed me with his charming brand of sweet talk.”

Typical troll. Relentless and desperate for attention.

“At least your online nemesis uses a portmanteau with Moriarty, Doc Holmes. It keeps the theme clean.” He sat back and regarded her. “Edrisa, you never post inside information about the cases… or me, do you?”

Horror at the suggestion crossed her face. “What? No, of course not! Leaking private information on cases is trouble, and I would never betray you that way! Have I agreed once or twice when someone’s brought up how smart you were on the Kingdom Lake killer profile? Yeah, sure. Anyone would.”

He smiled, never quite surprised but always flattered by her stumbling praise.

“But you don’t have to worry about that. I don’t want you to think I’d help people chip away at your private life, especially since you’re letting me stay here. I promise. You’re being such a great friend to me. I want to be the same for you.”

He considered that and her and even taking his deep inexperience with platonic relationships into account, he knew a net positive when he saw it, and that was certainly what he had with her. He couldn’t remember ever leaving an encounter with her without having smiled. She was kind and optimistic and was free with compliments. She saw his strangeness but appreciated it, rather than felt disdain, or worse, discomfort. He could be comfortable with her without worrying about offending or creeping her out. He could be himself, and that was a really nice and rare thing for him to find.

“You are my friend,” he assured her. He made a face at the screeching, frothing hate speech in the post in reply to her own innocuous one on Justice Quest. “And I do not like this guy.”

She gave the post a passing scowl. “I doubt his mother does.”

With a smile, he lifted the remote and pressed the power button for the TV. “So. Horror rom-coms, you say?”

She lit up. “And popcorn!”

Hopping back up, she hurried over to the kitchen and left him to scroll through the page of comments on Justice Quest. There weren’t that many trolls, at least not any as aggressive as MoriAnarchy. He scrolled down to the bottom and found another comment from Edrisa in response to someone giving Malcolm kudos for his profiling work.

**DocHolmes:** He’s a genius! They don’t call him Bright for nothing. :D

A small smile tilted his lips. Flattered, not surprised. Edrisa’s kindness was welcome and expected. He closed the laptop and set it aside as she flopped back down next to him with a big bowl of fresh popcorn. She held it out to him.

“Remember when I told you that most foods make me sick?” he asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s one of them.”

“Oh.”

He grinned. “The smell is nice, though.”

She perked back up. “Oh! Well, breathe deep. What kind of scary love story do you want? The reality-adjacent kind or the supernatural dead people in love kind?”

“Give me dead people,” he decided. He was in the mood for escapism, and both love and animated dead people could provide that.

“Cool. Vampires or zombies?”

He shook his head as he leaned back into the couch. “These subgenres have subgenres. Dealer’s choice. Hit me.”

“Zombies, it is,” she said and started flipping around to find what she was looking for. “It’s weird but not as weird as you’d think. Keep an open mind.”

His father was a notorious serial killer, and he was coping with enough mental illnesses to catch the side eye from the majority of people he encountered on any given day. Still, she was willing to trust him enough to stay at his place without so much as a shadow of skepticism about her safety or his stability. He’d call that pretty open-minded and was certainly willing to return the favor with something as small as a movie.

She was right. It really wasn’t as weird as it should have been. It was actually pretty sweet. He took a sniff hit of the popcorn bowl whenever she offered it. They laughed and ended up having a pretty interesting post-movie conversation about the realities of decomposition and how long two animated corpses could actually carry on a sex life with the timeline of their rotting parts. Science said that their happily ever after wasn’t too long of an after. He went to bed feeling a little proud of himself. He was getting kind of good at this friendship thing.

****

It took Gil a week to figure out that Edrisa was staying with him even though they’d arrived to a morning murder scene together straight from his apartment on her third day there and he’d smelled like her shampoo after forgetting to buy a new bottle of his own the next day. He didn’t know how people missed flashing billboards like that.

“You’re an investigator,” he chastised him in his office after Gil asked him about it, only after Edrisa asked him if he wanted pizza or Chinese for dinner while they were down in the morgue earlier. “You should pick up on things faster than this.”

Gil frowned at him and at his explanation for why she was staying there. “Just. Be careful with her. She likes you. It isn’t fair to lead her on.”

No, it wouldn’t be, but that wasn’t what was going on at all. “It isn’t like that. We’re friends. And it isn’t weird or awkward. Well, it’s both but in a comfortably compatible way. You have nothing to worry about.”

“Good. Because this team needs to work,” Gil warned. “We close cases. I wouldn’t want that to be disrupted by anything.”

“I wouldn’t let that happen. Her comfort in my home is only prioritized under her general safety. She’s not going back to The Six, and we’re getting on like a house on fire.”

Gil stared at him blankly. “Just don’t let the house burn down.”

Malcolm gave him a wry smile and left to get back to work. Work was complicated. His personal life, at least in this one specific case, was perfectly fine and simple. Gil had nothing to worry about.

****

“I think I should probably get out of your hair tomorrow,” Edrisa told him over fried rice the next night.

He was surprised to hear it. Already, he’d gotten used to her general patter around the apartment. It was nice having someone around besides him and Sunshine.

“Really? Is your apartment ready?”

She shook her head with a thoughtful frown as she dug into her food. “No. The landlord called me this afternoon. They’re fixing my neighbor’s apartment first since it wasn’t their fault they got all that flood damage, which is right and a good thing. But it looks like my place won’t be livable until at least the end of the month. It was okay when I thought it would only be a few more days, but I can’t crash with you that long.”

He genuinely wasn’t following her train of thought.

“Why?”

“Because I’m in the way.” She shrugged.

He looked around. His parakeet landed on the edge of the counter and perched there to listen to their conversation where they sat on the stools.

“Whose way? Because I like having you here, and Sunshine is the size of my fist. The apartment is like a football stadium to her. I assure you, you’re not in the way of either of us.”

“But a month?” she asked skeptically, fork raised halfway to her mouth. “Which might turn into a month and a half or two since my landlord is really pissed at me for the whole thing and might drag his feet as long as he possibly can in revenge. You’ll want or need your space back, but you’ll feel too guilty to speak up and tell me that once you’re sick of me being here because you don’t want to be rude after you already made the offer, and then things will just mount because I’ll sense it but the whole thing will be so unbearably uncomfortable by that point that I’ll be choked silent by the trauma of my embarrassment, and then poof!”

He jumped at the volume of her _poof_ and raised his eyebrows in amusement.

“No more friendship. Things will be tense at work because you’re tired of me, and I’m too humiliated to extract myself gracefully from the situation. It’ll affect my work, I’ll make a huge mistake, a murderer will go free because of my error, and bam!”

He jumped again but had to fight back a smile at this wild escalation in her forecast for the future.

“I’m fired. Just like that.” She shook her head slowly and met his eyes. “And I don’t know how I’ll juggle unemployment and homelessness at the same time. I’m not built for the stress management of that double drop into suck. I might not survive the blow. This little arrangement”—she finally met his eyes again as she circled her fork back and forth between them in the apartment—“may result in my untimely, but by that miserable point, merciful death.” She went back to eating, dismissing the notion of her continuing to stay there under the pressure of her elaborate and absurd prediction. “Not worth the risk.”

“That would indeed be tragic,” he agreed. “Especially since I don’t know your favorite flower yet and wouldn’t know what to send to your family after my eventual, unintentional torment of you leads to you succumbing to your woes and perishing. My mother would never forgive the breach in decorum if I didn’t get the flowers right.”

“More reason to go.”

“Yes,” he said. “Or.” And they saw the future very differently in this case. He was all for bleak realities and the general lows that followed his waking steps right after him into his nightmares, but he wasn’t putting up with Edrisa the way she painted it. She was a guest, sure, but she was a friend, someone he counted on and someone whose company brightened his day no matter what else was going on. Things just weren’t going to go down a Shakespearean spiral. “Or you trust me when I say I don’t mind and I won’t mind if you end up having to stay two months or four. And we go on as we have been. And everything is fine. Do you think you could do that?”

She hesitated with her mouth stuffed with vegetables and waited until she got a drink before answering with narrowed, suspicious eyes, “Okay…”

He went back to his dinner happily with that settled.

“Daisies,” she added.

He looked over his wine glass at her. “Sorry?”

“My favorite flower. In case you’re wrong, I’m right, and staying here kills me.”

“You’re supposed to be an optimist,” he scolded.

“And you’re supposed to see the bad stuff even before it happens.”

“Maybe we’re rubbing off on each other,” he teased.

She shook her head at her plate. “Daises,” she repeated. “As in, me, pushing them.”

“Daisies,” he corrected. “As in, innocence, purity, and new beginnings.”

She wasn’t buying it, so he’d have to show her. He wasn’t always doom and gloom. Sometimes a good thing was just a good thing and nobody had to die at all.

****

Malcolm had seen Edrisa scared. He’d seen her happy and fumbling and awkward. He’d even seen her mad. But he’d never seen her well and truly pissed off before. It was kind of amazing.

The new case was taking a while. They were three weeks into it with few leads, his profile was vague, and there weren’t any suspects. To complicate matters, there were now competing theories about times of death and cause. Dr. Forrester, a medical examiner from another hospital came to consult after bodies he’d done autopsies on had been connected to the new case and to the bodies that Edrisa had examined for them. They seemed to agree that the now six people that passed through their morgues were dead and little else beyond that. To make matters worse, Dr. Forrester was condescending in his disagreement and repeatedly called her by terms of endearment with no endearment behind any of them. Malcolm was fascinated by that level of open narcissism, if only for the fact that some HR department hadn’t gotten rid of him by now. Their good luck, he guessed.

Gil had his eyes on the scrawny bald man, but both JT and Dani were staying out of it and keeping their distance as the two medical examiners went at it. Their disagreement reached a pinnacle when Dr. Forrester turned his back on her to speak to Gil.

“Look. I’ve sent my files to your office. I’d reference those if you actually want to solve this thing. Miss Tanaka tried her best, but no one with experience would agree with her assessments. It’s my recommendation that you ignore her findings until they’re reviewed by her superior.”

Edrisa lost it, and it was a thing of calm, collected, absolutely red hot enraged beauty. She walked around him in front of Gil so that he was facing her again.

“And my recommendation is that you call me Dr. Tanaka. It’s doctor, not Miss, not honey, not sweetheart, and it’s sure as hell not darling. It’s my recommendation that you have all of your previous autopsies reviewed by doctors with half a brain in their heads because I’ve never encountered someone as incompetent as you’ve been at every turn. But most of all, and please do not mistake my courteous volume for patience, it is my personal recommendation that you get the hell out of my morgue.”

The guy went beet red. His lips thinned to white lines and he glanced at Malcolm, Gil, and JT—curiously or not so curiously, he didn’t look at Dani who was probably also just another ‘honey’, ‘sweetheart’, ‘darling’ to him—a moment, but she’d beaten him silent. He snatched up his satchel and stormed out.

JT slow clapped when he was gone. “That dude was a douche. If you’d kneed him, I’d have told the disciplinary board I didn’t see crap.”

Gil passed him a frown but from the resigned look in his eyes, Malcolm doubted he would have ratted her out either. Malcolm lingered as the others filed out.

“That was impressive,” he told her as he came over to her beside the empty exam table. “And for the record, I think your words hit him harder than your knee could have, but he deserved both.”

She smiled, but it was a little strained. The anger and indignation would take a while to shake. “Thanks. But what about the report? His assessments will change your profile, won’t they?”

Their findings were different enough that they would have had to change his own conclusions.

“Sure,” he agreed. “If I was going with them.”

Surprise crossed her face. “You’re sticking with my files?”

He reached out and squeezed her shoulders, making eye contact and hoping she understood him and took his word for it when he told her, “Edrisa, from the bottom of my heart, that man was not only an arrogant ass but very obviously not as capable or intelligent as you are. I trust you, and more importantly here, I trust your work. We’re going to catch this guy, and when we do, your medical expertise will have contributed to that just like it has countless times before. Okay?”

It took a second of searching his eyes to be sure he was telling the truth and not placating her, but Edrisa sort of melted under his hands.

“Thanks, Bright,” she gushed. “That means a lot to me.”

He smiled as he stepped back and teased, “Anytime, honey, sweetheart, darling.”

Her eyes sharpened. “You know, both you and JT have planted the idea of kneeing someone in the groin in my head. That thought could magically manifest into the physical world at any time.”

Malcolm’s eyes widened and he took quick steps back. “I’m leaving now. Thanks for the hard work, _Dr._ Tanaka.”

She puffed up a little, and it warmed him to be able to boost her mood back up after the thrashing it took. She gave him an awkward salute and he gave her one last smile as he headed out, pausing at the door to look back at her. She’d lifted her clipboard and was already squinting down at the chart to check her work. They really were very lucky to have her. The elevator doors were closing after him when he realized he was still smiling.

****

Admittedly, it wasn’t a great look. The coffin. The woman screaming and pounding on the top trying to escape and Malcolm calming standing in front of it with his hand at his chin observing the whole thing all added up to a pretty messed up view for an outsider. His mother choosing that exact moment to use her key to let herself in unannounced was perfectly in line with her uncanny ability to bully her way in at exactly the worst possible times. It was magic. If only she honed it towards something productive. World peace would be nice. A mute button for his father. The ability for speech in a parakeet. But no. It was dark magic, practiced only to complicate his life.

Jessica stepped into his apartment and abruptly covered her mouth and exclaimed in horror at the scene she’d walked into. Her own fault for not knocking. Malcolm sometimes had trouble figuring out what would disturb a person, but even he didn’t need cue cards to tip him off that it was alarming to walk in on your son standing over a girl trapped in a coffin even if your ex-husband wasn’t the Surgeon.

“What in God’s name are you doing?!”

“Mother.” He swiveled to face her and raised his hands. “It’s not what it looks like.”

Her eyes were still huge, and he knew he had a limited amount of time to clear up the situation before he was on the bad end of his mother’s temper. “It sure as hell better not be, or so help me, Malcolm, you will not like what it means when I tell you that you are grounded.”

He imagined that being grounded for following in his father’s footsteps would look less like the times he was confined to his room as a teenager and would involve actual ground and a coffin not unlike the one parked in front of him.

The screaming and pounding stopped.

Edrisa’s muffled voice said, “Wait, are you talking to someone? Does that mean I can come out now because, not going to lie, air is getting pretty thin and you might as well leave me in here if I stay closed up much longer.”

Malcolm’s eyes jumped wider than his mother’s at that, and he hurried to squat down and release the latch and open the lid for her.

“It’s alive!” Edrisa popped up with her best Frankenstein impersonation, and Jessica screamed again, managing like a champ not to twist her ankle in her heels as she jumped back. Malcolm snorted but shut up at the sharp angry look she shot him. “Oh! Mrs. Whitly!”

Edrisa struggled to climb out and almost fell on her face in the attempt. Malcolm caught her and helped her step out of the coffin in one piece.

“I—Hello.” She straightened out her clothes and fixed her crooked glasses, but it was an awkward effort with her hands still stuffed in the red boxing gloves he’d put on her before she went in. “It’s so nice to see you again.”

“Again?” Jessica turned an indignant look on Malcolm. “Have I met this reanimated corpse before?”

“You have.” And he didn’t have time to wonder at the pang he felt that he’d made a mistake allowing them to meet again in this particularly egregious way. It wasn’t like it mattered what his, admittedly judgmental, mother thought about Edrisa anyway. It wasn’t like they would see much of each other. “Twice. At the carousel, you remember? And the Night at the Ballet event. Edrisa is the medical examiner I work with. You'd think your meetings would have been memorable since they were both murder scenes.”

Jessica fixed him under a dry stare. "You say that like you or your father would allow murder to be a rare occurrence in my life."

“I couldn’t shake your hand before,” Edrisa said. “I was wearing gloves and touching a dead guy. Hi! It’s so nice to meet you. Bright is fantastic! Good job with that.”

She thrust her hand out for her to shake but realized she was jutting a boxing glove out and struggled to yank them both off and drop them to the floor while Jessica stared blankly down the length of her nose at her. At the time, protecting her hands from injury while she beat at the coffin lid had seemed smart, but now the gloves only served to make the situation appear monumentally weirder. Edrisa held a normal hand out as soon as she could. Malcolm managed not to let his apprehension show but didn’t breathe until his mother let her indignation pass enough to restore her manners and accepted Edrisa’s hand in her own.

“Thank you,” she said and turned a scathing expression on Malcolm. She always could dissect him with a look. “I take full credit for anything ‘fantastic’ about him. Whatever _this_ is, he gets from his father. Oh, dear God. Please tell me this isn’t a sex thing.”

Edrisa chortled. “There isn’t enough room in there for that.” She spun towards Malcolm. “Not that coffin sex crossed my mind at all while I was in there. I was very professional.”

Malcolm navigated the awkward traps she accidentally set for him by ignoring them altogether and turned back to his appalled mother.

“This is work,” he told her and bent down to see if Edrisa’s efforts to escape had done any damage to the interior. “There’s a problem with a witness statement. She says she escaped being buried alive by getting herself out of a coffin of this make and model. I suspect she's lying, and since Edrisa is the same size and couldn’t so much as crack the lid open with it locked, that’s now a confirmed suspicion.” He stood back up. “Thank you, Edrisa.”

“Sure!”

“Fine,” Jessica said with disdain, “but why all the screaming? Should someone have heard this witness wherever she was being held?”

“No,” Edrisa said, looking chipper. “That part was just for fun. Was I loud?”

“Very,” Malcolm said at the same time that Jessica nearly growled, “Yes.”

“Oh.”

Malcolm was barely able to contain his amusement at her belated reconsideration of choosing to act out the witness statement with such verve, but he was pretty sure his mother would throw him in that coffin and drag him off somewhere to bury if he didn’t treat her recent scare with the sensitivity she believed it deserved.

“Edrisa, will you excuse us a minute?”

“Sure thing. It was wonderful seeing you again, Mrs. Whitly.”

“Yes. Meeting you was… certainly a thing that happened.” It was the best his mother could do, and Malcolm supposed he should have given her credit for the attempt. At least Edrisa walked off to watch TV on the couch without being offended.

He turned to her, exasperated but patient. If his mother’s frequently inconvenient appearances had taught him anything, it was how to settle in and wait for the hurricane to pass. There was usually a hurricane.

“Why not do these horrible experiments at work?” she asked, and he thought he might get away with more of a lightning storm from her since the immediate pain to her nerves had dulled but her gaze continued to sweep his apartment and the storm behind her eyes grew a funnel cloud. “Is she staying here?!”

There were too many signs of Edrisa strewn around, and his mother didn’t miss anything. Her purse and jacket on the coatrack were acceptable for a visitor. Her hairbrush and makeup on the counter and the kitten calendar she’d tacked to the wall were harder to explain.

“No?”

Jessica snatched the picture of Sunshine off the fridge that Edrisa had edited to make it look like she was wearing a tiny tuxedo and hung up with a magnet. She held it in front of his face.

He tried again. “I could have put that there.”

If she glared at him any harder, he’d start to burn under the heat of it.

“Fine, fine. Yes, she’s staying here. No, it’s not a big deal. I didn’t mention it because I knew you’d try to turn it into one. Which you are.”

“Is this why you haven’t been coming to family dinners? You’ve been sharing your meals elsewhere?”

That and he knew she or Ainsley would end up worming the truth out of him, and he wasn’t up for them prying into something that was totally not a big thing. At all.

“Yes. Edrisa is my guest. It’s my responsibility to—”

“To what, abandon your mother while you play absurd funeral parlor games with your new live-in—”

“Mother.”

“—houseguest.” She swallowed whatever other word she was going to use to describe her around a plastic smile. She looked over where Edrisa was laughing at something on the cartoon she was watching. With a roll of her eyes, she steeled herself. “Just bring her, why don’t you?”

“To family dinner?” Malcolm asked with real surprise. Of all the things he expected from his mother in reaction to today, an invitation extended to Edrisa to dine at the Milton family home was not the curveball he would have predicted.

“Yes. Why not? I’ll need time to adjust to her, won’t I? At least she’s a doctor.”

“Mother,” he warned.

She waved him off and started for the door at the same time Edrisa laughed again, and the sweet sound of it drew his eyes over to her. It was nice having laughter in the apartment. And company that didn’t mind getting locked in a coffin before dinner. She chased the emptiness away. It was hard to stew in the past when Edrisa laughed. It was a very present sound. It was bracing. When he looked back at his mother, her eyes were narrowed on him with shrewd suspicion. His face fell.

“What?”

A frown deepened on her face with a knowing look in her sharp eyes, but he stared back nonplussed. She sighed and shook her head.

“Oh, Malcolm,” she said and cupped his cheek. “For someone who sees everything for a living, you’re still a man. And every man has a blind spot.”

He furrowed his brow, but she only called out a dismissive goodbye to Edrisa and let herself out.

“Bye! Nice to see you! Hope we can—”

The door slammed, and Edrisa sank down where she hung over the back of the couch.

“She seems really nice,” Edrisa said to him instead, and he was warmed at the compliment, delivered unironically.

“Nicer than my father.” That was about as close to agreeing that his mother was nice that he was willing to go.

He walked over to the couch and dropped down beside her. “What are we watching?”

She watched. Mostly, he just liked listening to her laugh and braced himself with it.

****

His night terrors took them on a roller coaster. The kind that rattled too hard and needed to be put out of commission.

He got lucky the first week she stayed at his apartment. His nightmares were on the tame end of the spectrum, and one night he didn’t sleep at all.

Week two and three ran him so ragged with a case that he hardly slept. Week four was not so lucky. Monday night brought one of the gritty night terrors that worked out his restraints, dug deep in the well of his childhood trauma, and would have frightened most children and some adults who heard the noises coming from his bedroom. He woke up screaming, and his screams blended almost harmoniously with the screams of Edrisa in the waking world. He gasped fully awake and it took a second for him to realize that his screams had woken and triggered her own. In the thick, blaring silence, he fell back against his pillows and took a beat, the old feelings of regret tinged with embarrassment roaring up.

He spit out his night guard.

“You all right?” he called loudly enough for his voice to carry over to her across the apartment.

“No.” Her voice wafted over to him after a brief pause but she quickly added, “I mean, yes. It is my medical opinion that I will survive this. However.”

He shifted in the darkness and felt guilty about not pressing the idea to set her up in a nice quiet hotel room with no roommate that descended from a serial killer. Once that seed of horror was planted, it only grew and grew. “However?”

An airy, relieved laugh broke the quiet. “Nope. Never mind. False alarm. Thought I’d developed a heart murmur. My fingertips looked blue, but it’s just the lighting. Or lack of lighting. I’m human colored.”

“Good to hear.” He waited for his heart to steady and hoped hers was doing the same. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s cool. I’ve always wanted to be brave enough to skydive or bungee jump. This is, like, extreme sleeping. You’re building my courage.”

Malcolm smiled at the ceiling and closed his eyes. “Well, by the end of your stay, you’ll be ready to parasail off Everest.”

That or he’d scare off another person in his life, and really, the odds spoke for themselves.

****

He held his hand behind his back as he entered the morgue with the rest of the team the next afternoon and walked up to Edrisa as she looked up from the body on the table.

“I have a present for you,” he said.

She lit up. “Is it a lollipop? I love your surprise lollipops.”

“Even better.” He pulled his hand around to reveal the small package of earplugs. “A $5 ticket to a full night of sleep.”

“Oh, hey!” She took them with a grin.

“Noisy neighbors?” JT asked.

She rocked back and forth. “Noisy roommate. It’s like falling asleep with the TV on full volume while you were watching a slasher movie.”

That was probably more accurate than hyperbole.

JT looked from her to him and back again. “Wait. Are you two shacking up together? For real?”

Malcolm saw the rise of alarm in Dani’s eyes as she put two and two together too and raised his hand to stop their imaginations from running off with them. “In a perfectly normal and respectable fashion, yes. Edrisa was in a bind.”

“And Bright released my bonds,” Edrisa said but quickly backtracked at Dani’s raised brow and JT’s persistent stare. “In a symbolic way. He helped me with my trouble. Not ‘bonds’ like the ones on his bed. Was that clear? Bright’s been a gentleman.”

Now everyone was staring at him, and Malcolm was glad for the dead body whose murder needed solving.

“Very,” he said. “Shall we discuss the body?”

Edrisa fluctuated from awkward to professional with enthusiasm. “Certainly. Do you want the time of death, cause of death, or the stuff about the Barbie doll heads that ties into both of those things?”

Malcolm smiled as he bent over the body with her and leaned in. “I want all of it. Let’s end with the Barbies. Every climax needs a good buildup.”

Edrisa brightened and blushed, and maybe it was his wording or her joy at having someone around who got it, this fascination they shared with death and ghoulishness.

“I couldn’t agree more,” she said, and when he glanced at her he realized how close they were standing and how intimate and strange the likeness was, sometimes, between discussing murder and leaning in for a kiss. If they weren’t in a morgue over a dead man under a sheet, they might have been on a street corner admiring antiques through a storefront window for how close they were standing and how easily peering into her eyes at that distance could turn into him leaning in for something else.

Gil cleared his throat, and they both looked up sharply. Malcolm tossed him a smile and refocused on the case. He was interested in the parallel was all. Comparison was a natural consideration for a profiler.

****

His scream may have woken Edrisa, but it was her scream that woke him. Malcolm flinched awake that night and gave himself a moment to pant and steady himself from the dream of the woods, the girl in the box, and his father’s broad smile.

“Edrisa?” he called out when he regained control of his voice. “Are the earplugs useless?”

Maybe an earplug/earmuff combo would better mute his unnatural wake-up calls?

“Um. The earplugs would probably be more effective if they were in my ears.”

That was true.

“Did you forget?” he asked the darkness.

There was a pause and some shuffling before Edrisa appeared in the shadowy area beside his bed. She hung back and twisted her hands in front of her with some chagrin.

“Not ‘forgot’, exactly.”

“What is it?” he asked, turning his head more fully towards her but staying flat against the bed. He didn’t feel recovered enough to sit up or put on a lamp and hoped she couldn’t make out the sheen of sweat on his forehead in the dark.

“It’s just—” She looked away with a tilt of her head before stepping closer to the bed and meeting his eyes again. “I feel bad! You can’t turn off your screams. Why should I be able to?”

He exhaled on a wave of affection. She was smart and helpful, very funny, incidentally, and always ready to lighten the mood or work through a problem. She was also unnecessarily sweet.

“You’re my guest.” He considered it. “And normal. And normal guest people should be able to sleep through the night and not be disturbed by the abomination known as my limited and terrifying sleep routine. Please use the earplugs.”

It was a pout he got. An actual pout. “I don’t wanna.”

He would have laughed if he wasn’t still so spent. “Then please let me put you up at the Plaza. They have a spa. I can’t even offer you uninterrupted sleep or a full fridge.”

He’d made an effort to have more stocked for her use, but grocery shopping was hard to remember in the heat of capturing a killer.

Her lips thinned in determination. “We’ll figure this out, and the answer isn’t the Plaza or earplugs. I believe in us.”

She walked off to return to the couch, and he leaned up on his elbow to call after her, “What does that mean?”

He didn’t get an answer and flopped back against the mattress to get what meager sleep he could.

****

By week five, Edrisa got pragmatic. His subconscious adapted quickly to her external noise, the reactive screams to his screams. He slept straight through them, and his night terrors intensified. She tried pulling him out of the night terrors during ones he got trapped in for too long, when he screamed himself raw or, worse, cried. Because that wasn’t embarrassing at all.

She blasted ocean sounds from her phone. He didn’t wake up, but he did get carried off under a wave and start to drown as his father held him by the ankle below the surface in his nightmare. Edrisa winced at that news and promised to retire the white noise strategy.

She whistled one night. Played classical music the next. Poked him with the fuzzy end of a new feather duster. All that one did was tickle his face and make him dream about ants crawling over him inside a twenty foot grave. Every time he tried to climb, the ground rose higher and farther away from his reaching hands.

He got water trickled on his face and an ice cube down his shirt. No dice. He still woke her up, still took forever to wake up himself, and the night terrors rolled on, as strong and horrible as ever.

The earthquake was the worst one. That was, the earthquake that Edrisa created. His dream started off perfectly normal. Normal for him. He was trapped in the trunk of a car with a dead body, only the dead body was Ainsley as a little girl and her eyes were open. Her lips wouldn’t move, but he could hear her talking anyway. He screamed and screamed for her to not be dead, to stay alive, stay with him—and then the whole world went topsy-turvy. The trunk popped open, and he and Ainsley’s corpse crawled out of it into a huge dirt field. The earth shook, and deep crevices split under their feet and grew deeper and wider as the world trembled violently. They fell into the giant gap that splintered directly below them a moment before he finally snapped awake.

Only, the world still shook. It took him a wild, panicked moment of total disorientation to understand what was happening. It wasn’t the world that was shaking, just his bed, and it wasn’t an earthquake doing the damage. It was one pajama-clad houseguest and, on days when she wasn’t scaring the crap out of him, friend. Edrisa hopped up and down, up and down, jumping on the bed, and after a desperate beat of confusion, he found his voice.

“What are you doing?”

Edrisa quit her hopping and came to a bouncing stop with a sudden smile. “Oh, good. You’re awake. That took forever. The only time I ever slept as deeply as you do in one of your nightmares was in med school when I existed on Red Bull and Pixy Stix until I crashed. I could have been hit by a train at that point and snored straight through it. Not that I snore!”

“Edrisa.”

She looked back down where she stood above him. “Yeah?”

His heart still raced from the nightmare and the fake quake imagined from the real quake happening under fuzzy socks. He freed his wrists and plucked his night guard from his mouth.

“Why are you jumping on my bed?”

She looked at him like she was utterly confused by his confusion. “Because I wanted to see if motion would wake you up faster than auditory stimuli. The initial results are: absolutely not. In fact, it took you way longer to come around than usual. I’m kind of winded. I should probably add more cardio to my routine. Maybe a part of your subconscious was lulled by the movement and dragged you down deeper. But for the best results, I suppose I really should test the theory more than once.”

She took an experimental hop, and Malcolm shook off the last of his sleep addled fog. He rolled up and shot forward, catching her by the waist and dragging her down onto the mattress with a yelp.

“Edrisa?” He stared down where he’d trapped her.

She stilled, cautious. “Yes?”

“No more earthquakes. Earthquakes bad.”

The simplification did the trick. She nodded up at him. “Got it. No quakes.” Her gaze turned thoughtful. “What about a _slight_ rumble? A gentle tremor? A minor jostling?”

Malcolm dropped his forehead against the mattress beside her. “Maybe I should check into the Plaza,” was his muffled response.

“No Plaza. And no giving up!” Edrisa rolled out from under the arm trapping her and marched off for the couch with concerning finality about it. “I have faith in us.”

He still didn’t know why.

Malcolm turned onto his back, slow and tired. He had faith that he was going to unintentionally drive her crazy with his nightmares or get driven (more) crazy by her aggressive adventures in helping him.

****

Then something kind of miraculous happened. A month and a half into her stay, against all odds, Edrisa tried something different. Something that worked.

Malcolm was warm and comfortable, enjoying sound sleep, when he felt a gentle hand shaking his shoulder and stirred. Edrisa leaned over the bed and whispered his name to wake him. When she saw his eyes open and blink up at her, she stood back with a satisfied smile. His eyes darted around in the darkness, but everything seemed fine and she didn’t look scared or distressed. The night was calm and possessed a quality of expansive stillness inside and beyond the apartment that let him know morning was still a long way off even without glancing at the clock.

“You woke me up.”

“Uh-huh.” There was a smugness to her response. He didn’t understand.

“But I wasn’t having a night terror.” In fact, he was having a pretty mundane dream about taking a nap in a field of daisies. There was an oddly appealing sense of comfort and happiness about it.

“I know.” Still that air of self-satisfaction.

He was wary now. “Explain.”

A flash of excitement like she’d just finished a tricky autopsy or solved a case with a simple bit of science lit her eyes, and she sat down on the edge of the bed beside him. “Two words: anticipatory awakening.”

Malcolm pushed himself up against the pillows, but that was weak as far as explanations went. He pulled out his night guard.

“Okay…. Now more words,” he prompted.

She folded her leg up on the bed and twisted around to face him. “Without biofeedback, hypnosis, relaxation or some serious cognitive behavioral therapy, this nightmare loop will loop forever. But! I’ve noticed a pattern on your worse nights. You’re prone to nightmares in general, but the night terrors, the ones that turned my hair white the first night you had one while I was here, that kind of bloody murder, mental torture comes to you on a very consistent timeline. Like clockwork. Between two and two and half hours after you go to bed, bang!”

He jumped.

Edrisa leaned over and grabbed one of his restraints to rattle. “You freak out and holler and go bananas. Because of the nightmare stuff!”

Yes. He was very familiar with the nightmare stuff.

“I’m following so far.”

She nodded. “So I’ve been reading studies on night terrors. There’s been all kinds of experimental treatments and drugs and therapies. Mostly children. You’re a bit of a rarer breed. In any case, there’s been some success with anticipatory awakening. Pinpointing when you typically have the night terrors, which I’ve narrowed down to a promising half hour window. You intentionally wake yourself up about fifteen minutes before you typically experience the event. You stay up for a few minutes before going back to sleep, and it interrupts the cycle! At least, that’s the hope. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, but it couldn’t hurt to try, right?”

He supposed not, though he doubted it would make much difference. He thought of his nightmares as hauntings, and he didn’t think there was an exorcism in the world that could rid him of those ghosts. He played along, though.

Edrisa kept him company, talking to him about her own childhood, silly stories that were funny and light and so much kinder than his own twisted youth, until it was time to go back to sleep.

He slept through the morning, long after Edrisa left for work, feeling strangely refreshed. He didn’t remember any of his dreams after going back to sleep. If they’d been bad, he hadn’t carried them with him into waking, and they hadn’t gotten a tight enough grip on him to leave a mark.

Huh.

****

After Edrisa finished giving the new details of her report to them in the interrogation room and the team started to disperse, Malcolm rounded the table to go to her. Her anticipatory awakening experiment was ongoing, and he couldn’t argue with the results.

“I haven’t had a night terror in almost two weeks,” he told her. Nightmares, sure, still every other night, but the kind that stripped him of so much sleep that he started to hallucinate were under fragile control. So far. It was a nice vacation even if the whole system crumbled.

“That’s fantastic!” She held her hand up for a high-five, and his gaze swept to the floor with his smile before he touched his hand to hers. The slap was light, and he closed his fingers around hers, giving it a squeeze with real gratitude as he met her eyes.

“Thank you, Edrisa. I appreciate you wanting to help me. Don’t be disappointed if they come roaring back.” They probably would. His night terrors were adaptable predators that had overpowered every one of his previous attempts to eliminate them. “It means a lot to me that you tried. You’re… a good friend.”

He wasn’t sure why he hesitated or what that flicker of doubt was that rose up sometimes if he was typing and felt his hands make a typo or misremembered a statistic and felt his uncertainty for the information before remembering the correction. It was a skip in his mind, telling him he was off slightly, had made a mistake or taken a wrong step somewhere. But Gil was back in the doorway to collect him, and he let go of Edrisa’s hand that he’d lowered between them but thoughtlessly still held, without pinpointing the error.

It was probably nothing. He just wasn’t used to that much sleep. It was throwing him off, not teetering on the edge of anxious exhaustion. He didn’t know how normal people did this all the time. It was off-putting being so steady. He didn’t know what to do with all that even ground. He waved to Edrisa as he walked out, and she gave him a bright smile that went straight through him and pierced that feeling of uncertainty.

It followed him out of the room.

****

His screams cut through his nightmare and brought him awake, but it was Edrisa’s murmured curse against his ear that he registered first.

“Dammit.”

Her arms were around him where she knelt on the bed at his side. He was upright and straining against his restraints but quit jostling her where her hug grounded him back to the waking world. He panted and his arms twitched to go around her instinctively, but the tension in the restraints stopped him. He dropped his cheek against her shoulder and burrowed his face into the crook of her neck instead as his heart pounded.

Her hand came up and down in soothing lines and slow circles on his back. He sunk into the touch and closed his eyes, inhaled the strawberry smell of her shampoo, and waited for the sharp edges of the nightmare to blur and soften with distance. Slowly, the tension fell away until he was loose and heavy in Edrisa’s arms.

Her voice was low and worried, but her grasp on him was firm and offered strength he didn’t have in those first disoriented moments of weak confusion and fear. “Are you here?”

He was in his apartment, not lost in the woods being chased by a man he couldn’t see but whose hateful laughter he knew by heart. He wasn’t a boy anymore but a man, safe in his own apartment in his own bed, secure in his home, safe in the quiet—not alone. He was okay.

“I’m with you,” he whispered.

“Good.” She leaned back, and he had to let her, his arms still tied at the wrists. She gave him a wry, sympathetic little smile that he made out through the dim light from the window. “I guess our lucky streak is over.”

His own smile was tired but real. They had a good run. “Guess so.”

“Want to talk about it?” She gently freed his left wrist, then his right. He’d forgotten the night guard or gotten sloppy since the bite of his dreams had dulled lately. He was lucky he hadn’t bitten his tongue off.

It was a surprise to feel that he did want to talk about it. He was usually a fan of repression and forward momentum.

“Is that all right?” he asked, catching her eyes under his lashes, unsure how hard he should press her generosity with his peculiarities. Not many people would have lasted two months under the same roof with someone with his eccentricities.

“Of course.” She flopped over to the other side of the bed and stretched out, cheek against the pillow as she hugged it and looked up at him as he pushed himself back against the headboard.

He hesitated, but he wanted to cut it out of himself and put it in the world, outside of his mind where he could examine it critically and release it. Edrisa waited patiently, and a glance at her open, trusting gaze warmed the ice freezing his words.

“So you know my father?”

“Not personally, no. Not that I wouldn’t be open to that if you wanted to introduce me.” The alarm that shot through him at that must have spoken for itself because she quickly added, “Totally not angling for that, by the by. Just letting you know that I’m open to meeting important people in your life, should you want to do that, is all. Because people do that. They meet their person's people. Not that you’re my person!”

“Aren’t I?” he asked, half in jest before her rambling could derail the conversation completely. “I’m at least one of your persons, right? A roommate, coworker, friend person. And your scary shrieking alarm clock person.”

She relaxed against the bed, half her smile buried in the pillow pressed to her face. “Definitely. You’re all of those things. And more. Other stuff. You’re my other stuff person.”

Fondness pressed like a balm against his heart, still coming down from its clamor. Gratitude for Edrisa’s company swelled at the sight of her beside him, a calming, light-hearted, happy presence. Nothing like the usual dark solitude he kept.

“Exactly. So my dad.”

“Whom I don’t know, except from case files and Justice Quest stuff online.”

He nodded, and the cold sheath that usually choked him silent on the subject splintered. “I saw a lot of… messed up stuff as a kid. Can I tell you?”

He appreciated that she didn’t answer right away. A seriousness stole over her, and she regarded him for a long moment in thought before she nodded and gave him leave to upturn the barrel of darkness he struggled to keep steady in his mind every day and let the buried memories spill out between them. He started slowly, reluctant to speak even with the urge to do so pushing him on. Edrisa listened. She watched.

She saw him.

Something unlocked in him at her unwavering attention. The rest of his words thawed, and he let them go. He relaxed against the pillows and sank lower against them the longer the words ran in a rush, slowed to a walk, and came to an eventual crawl as they emptied out of him.

He was flat on his back, watching the shadows on the ceiling, when he got to the part about knowing for sure that the girl in the box was real and not just a figment of his broken mind. The hand resting between them on the mattress shook with that old familiar tremor. Without saying anything, Edrisa reached out in the darkness and pressed her small hand over his. He trembled but steadied in her grip. When she made to move away, he flipped his hand over and laced their fingers together to hold her there, never looking, but grateful when she squeezed his hand and said nothing.

She let him talk as long as he needed to. He gave, and she took. Or maybe it was the other way around.

He whispered them both to sleep with words of fear and old wounds that were too creative and changeable to heal. Maybe pouring out the nightmares stopped them from chasing his dreams because no more came. He woke up with the rising sun with warm morning light spilling over the girl whose comforting hand was still loose in his, breathing softly against his pillow in a pair of fuzzy green pajamas. He’d told Edrisa she was a really good friend. A soft pressure in his heart reexamined that assessment.

Malcolm understood the error he made.

****

Malcolm found Dani at her desk at the precinct while he waited for JT and Gil to get back from running down a lead on their case. He leaned on it beside her chair and despite his best effort to appear casual, awkwardness must have shined through because she gave him a raised eyebrow and an expectant look. He decided to just come out with it since beating around the bush only ever increased the awkwardness in his experience.

“I have feelings for Edrisa.” There was the truth in its simplest form.

Only, he wasn’t great with this kind of thing. Understatement. He was, under no uncertain terms, bad at this kind of thing. It was best to get an outsider’s perspective before he took that simple truth and did anything with it. The past proved that his game was limited and his experience was a string of uncomfortable or depressing failures. It was fully possible that the right move was no move. Dani knew things. Dani was key to not taking something nice and turning it to crap.

Surprise came first, and that part he expected. It quickly dissolved into nonchalance, which he appreciated. This stuff was normal for other people. He mostly feigned normal when situations demanded it.

“Okay,” she said, setting her pen down and her paperwork aside. “Friendly feelings?”

Did he feel friendly towards Edrisa? Yes. They were friends. That made them friendly. However. His hand flexed with the memory of holding hers, and his mind flickered to the way the light moved slowly over her bare arm and leg as he watched the sunrise trail over her skin that morning. ‘Friendly’ didn’t quite encompass the contentment that came over him as he considered her in those quiet moments or the feeling of loss when he gently took his hand back to get up before she woke.

“Sure. Of course. Friendly… _plus_.”

Dani swiveled her chair to face him and crossed her arms. “You feel friendly ‘plus’ for her. How much plus?”

He smiled, thinking about having her in his apartment the past two months. All the extra times he found himself laughing, the general comfort of having another person around, the joy and fondness for Edrisa specifically, in his home, always around. “Kind of a lot, actually. An unexpected amount of plus.”

“Well. Good.”

“Good?”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah. Good. Most people, even when it’s pretty mutual, have some space to wonder if their feelings are returned. There is no space of doubt for you. You’ve got a guarantee. So yeah, I’d call that a lucky break. And a good one.”

His job was profiling. He was good at it. It wasn’t like he’d never noticed Edrisa’s crush on him. It was innocent and stumbling and sweet, and he’d always felt a protective kindness towards her in response. He felt something decidedly different about it now. It felt dangerously close to hope, and he’d learned long ago not to indulge that fairy tale.

“She did get here first, didn’t she?”

Dani gave him a look. “I heard a question mark, but I should have heard a period because I’ve never met anyone whose heart was more obviously on their sleeve. And Edrisa—”

“Edrisa feels friendly plus for me.”

“There’s the period.”

He stood up with a burgeoning smile and a nod of gratitude, feeling much more comfortable with the whole thing. It still didn’t mean he needed or should act on his feelings. Edrisa’s heart was big and good, and his life was so often narrowed down to his father, categorically bad. He needed to be careful with it. He needed to be sure. But it was nice for now to hear someone call it a good thing.

He didn’t get a whole lot of those.

****

He got a text from Edrisa around the time her work day typically ended: _Hope your day is going better than your night! <3 :) :)_

His night terrors coming earlier than the alarm went off that she had him set for himself was unfortunate, but he wouldn’t call it a bad night after the purging and enlightenment it led to. Certainly wasn’t one he would erase. He felt lighter. It wasn’t a bad way to wake up either.

He texted back: _I’m having a great day. Visiting a suspect with Gil, then I’ll see you at home._

He went back and forth on whether to add a heart at the end of the message but decided against it. Edrisa could throw ten emojis into any given text, and it was fitting and showcased her happy spirit. He’d feel his age and then some if he tried to mimic her style. He was more of a plain texter kind of guy, though Ainsley had goaded him into sending her a poop emoji once after she spammed him seventy-five times with a gif of an angry animated Satan in one hour as revenge for turning down her request to be interviewed on live television about a case.

He did send her another message, though, in boring plain text: _Thank you for last night. For listening and being there. It meant a lot to me._

A couple of minutes went by as he waited by the sidewalk for Gil to come out so they could leave, but his phone pinged again.

_Anytime! It makes me happy that I could help even in a small way. You don’t deserve everything you have to carry, but you carry it with a lot of grace. I’m always here if you need me!_

It was followed by a second message, which was a giant chaotic wall of emojis: hearts, stars, and smiley faces.

“What are you grinning at?”

Malcolm looked up from his phone and shrugged at Gil. “Nothing.”

Gil didn’t buy that, and Malcolm didn’t bother hiding his smile as he got into the car with him. He was allowed to be openly happy even if it was a weird look for him. It was an even weirder feeling.

****

Edrisa was sitting on the stairs pulling on a boot when Malcolm let himself into the apartment.

“Hey! I’m glad I caught you. I was just on my way out.”

“You’re leaving?” He raised the bag of takeout he’d brought. “But I got us Chinese. You showed me zombie love, and I was kind of hoping you’d broaden my vampire horizons tonight.”

She smiled but hurried down the stairs and grabbed her jacket and purse from the coatrack. “Sorry, I have plans. Save me some? The only thing better than a hot meal is cold leftovers.”

It wouldn’t be as nice as sharing the meal now, but she was in a good mood and it lifted his own after the dead end meeting with that suspect. “Of course. You look great.”

Then he really saw her. Tight jeans, a new pretty blouse, her favorite boots. She’d spent more time on her makeup, and she’d traded her black glasses for the blue frames she told him brought her good luck. She was dressed to impress. The pillars under his smile shook at the realization.

She was going on a date.

“Really great…” But she didn’t notice his crumbling spirit as she sifted around her purse to check for the copy of the keys he’d made her when it became clear her stay was going to be extended.

“Thanks. I hope so. I want to make a good impression. First impressions are everything, right?”

That was what they said. Her first impression of him had been favorable, probably more so than he deserved. Edrisa’s first impression on him was good too. He’d found her immediately smart and endearing. But where she’d been infatuated, he’d been fond. There was a window there for her feelings to persist and his to catch up, and from the looks of her fixing to leave, looking pretty and worried about her night going well, that window was closing.

“First impressions are fine, but there’s something to be said for the long road,” he told her, and she paused her search for the keys. “Sometimes second impressions are just as important. Or a third or two hundredth even! Impressions change all the time, and latent ones are arguably both more important and authentic because they’re real. They’re based on the reality of a person and not on a fantasy or surface-level personality traits and factoids. I’d care much more about someone giving you a two hundredth look.”

Was he getting his point across or just doing that thing where he talked himself in tangles and exhausted the listener? Edrisa stared at him puzzled.

Her brow furrowed. “I hope it doesn’t take two hundred impressions to like me.”

“Like? No! Of course not. Everybody likes you straight off,” he assured her in an awkward back-pedal. “You’re very likable. I only meant, you know, other feelings. Like love, for example. Sometimes things like that take time.”

If anything, she looked more confused. “That’s fine, I guess. I’m not really after love. Just looking for company that’s fun for a night, maybe a few drinks, and a good time.”

Oh, God. It was that kind of date. The swipe right and find out the thread count of someone’s bedsheets within an hour of meeting them kind of date. Edrisa hadn’t struck him as a woman who had a lot of one-night stands, but he didn’t claim to be an expert on the sexual habits of his friends.

The takeout bag started to weigh a hundred pounds in his hand, but he couldn’t think of a graceful way of asking her not to go hookup with a random guy because, hey, he’d finally started to reciprocate the feelings she’d had for him since day one. He wasn’t entitled to her evening and had no right to ask her to change her plans when he still wasn’t sure where they stood or what he wanted to change between them. Sometimes feelings didn’t require action. Sometimes it was smarter and ultimately better for both parties involved to choose inaction. Friendship was love after all and had its own value, and since he did value what they already had, he was inclined to keep his mouth shut about what he thought he wanted them to have. For now.

“When should I expect you home?” he asked.

“Not sure.” She finally spotted the keys where she’d abandoned them on the counter and hurried over to snatch them up. “If it goes well, and boy am I hoping it goes well, probably not till late. Maybe not at all. Who knows?” She chuckled. “I haven’t pulled an all-nighter in years. If we get carried away, the sun might beat me home. But probably not. I don’t have that kind of energy anymore.”

Malcolm always liked her easy openness, but in this case, he had to fight not to let his horror at all those TMI implications show.

“Don’t wait up,” she said and pulled the door open to leave.

“Edrisa!”

She turned, waited. An urgent sense to do or say something to make her stay swelled up in him, but it wasn’t his place. It might never be. The thought drained the tension from his shoulders and left only defeated looseness in resignation. He hoped it didn’t show in the smile he gave her.

“Have a good night.”

She hesitated in the doorway but moved back in and grabbed his arm to lean up and kiss him on the cheek.

“You too,” she said and left for her date.

Malcolm stared at the door and wondered if it was his father’s influence that it crossed his mind to follow and find out who her date was in case it turned into more than a one-off and he needed to strategize against the mystery man. But in the end, despite their many conflicts, he was a momma’s boy, and Jessica Whitly would never compromise her pride by acknowledging that competition existed.

So he ate alone, focused on the current case, and did not let his mind wander to Edrisa or how her date was going. At all. Not even a little. If Malcolm checked the clock every five minutes for the next four hours, it was an entirely unrelated coincidence. And if he stared at the empty side of the bed where Edrisa had fallen asleep beside him the night before for too long after going to bed, that was just his normal insomnia making him crazy.

He could be friends with Edrisa.

He _was_ friends with Edrisa.

And it was good. Even without the plus.

He repeated that in his head like his morning affirmations until he finally fell into the restless, uneasy slumber that came for bad liars and guys who were just one impression too late.

****

It wasn’t his alarm that woke him up but a loud thump by the door. The bad news was that he’d slept less than an hour. The good news was that it wasn’t long enough for his nightmares to get really bad. Just regular bad. The really part would come later.

“Edrisa?” he called, groggy. The numbers on his alarm clock glowed in the chill darkness settled over the apartment. It was well after midnight.

She popped into view, peering over, and he relaxed. Not a killer. That was good. Coming home this late was less good, but he’d take it over her not coming at all. She squinted over at him and slumped with relief.

“Oh good, you’re awake.” She hurried over in a zigzag, dropping her purse and yanking off her boots one at a time. She dropped everything on the floor as she went and rounded the bed to flop down beside him. “What a horrible night!”

She threw her arm over her eyes, flinched as she hit her glasses and pulled them off quickly before throwing her arm back over her eyes. Malcolm freed his arms and sat up.

“What’s wrong? Are you okay?” He couldn’t make her out clearly, but she didn’t appear hurt.

She lifted her arm to look up at him as he leaned over her in concern. “It started out okay. I’m not great at this kind of stuff, but I didn’t immediately embarrass myself or fall off anything. Sometimes I fall off things. But not tonight. Nope. Steady as a horse. Is that a saying? It was fun and we clicked, but then things got weird and bad.”

She shuddered, and even shadowed, there was a genuine look of discomfort in her eyes that worried him.

“What happened? Are you all right? Did your date hurt you?”

She redirected her gaze from the ceiling to meet his eyes. “Date? I don’t think you can call it that. Unless you’re into group stuff, I guess. I’m not, for the record, into group stuff. I’d get too confused if there were more than four hands groping around. I used to have this recurring dream as a kid where Durga, the Hindu goddess with all the arms, would hold me down and tickle me until I peed. In the dream, not in real life. Usually. Are you into group stuff—”

Usually, he was all for falling down one of Edrisa’s rambling rabbit holes, but his attention was elsewhere at the moment. “You weren’t on a date?”

“No. I texted you, didn’t I?” Edrisa arched up to pull her phone out of her back pocket. She scrolled around and her eyebrows went up as she found her mistake. “Ohhh. No. I texted my college roommate, Bree, instead of you. In my defense, your number is right under hers. . . . I haven’t spoken to her since last Christmas. She’s probably really confused about why I suddenly let her know my weekend plans. But she didn’t text back. Do you think that’s bad? We’re kind of just Christmas buddies at this point anyway, but—”

“You weren’t on a date?” Malcolm repeated to prompt an explanation but took it as a good sign that she was rambling and distracted, which was a normal baseline for her.

She shot her index finger up at him. “No. I was meeting a bunch of my New York based Justice Quest buddies IRL for the first time.” Her online friends from her true crime groups. The knot that had tied itself in his stomach, and if he were honest with himself, somewhere higher in his chest, began to rapidly untangle. It was a relief and a soft surprise at the size of that relief. “It was fun putting faces and voices to the posters. Everyone was so nice and friendly. We got on great.”

He tore his attention away from the revealing release of tension unraveling at his core and refocused on her actual night. It wasn’t a date, and that was fantastic but whatever it was had left her rattled.

“But?”

She rolled on her side and looked at the bed a moment before glancing back up at him. “But then MoriAnarchy showed up. Uninvited, I might add! I don’t even know how he knew we’d all be there. The other girls said they didn’t tell him either. The only thing I can think is he hacked one of our DMs, but that’s crazy, right?”

Malcolm already disliked the guy, but he didn’t like the sound of that at all. Going from harassing women online to hacking their messages and stalking them in real life was an escalation that sent off about fifty red flags.

“Very. What did he do?”

“You know how people can be really different in real life from how they act online? Like MadamKitty is bubbly and outgoing on the message boards, but she was so shy in person. Not so shy after we got a few drinks in her, let me tell you.”

“Edrisa.”

She sobered. “Right. Well, it wasn’t like that at all with MoriAnarchy. He was exactly like he is on the forums. Mean and rude and spiteful. Him: smart, us: dumb—that kind of thing, only with less caveman grunts and more sneering. We didn’t know what to do at first because we were all thinking that one of us had invited him. Eventually, he was so gross that we all excused ourselves to the bathroom at the same time and figured out that none of us had told him about the meetup. Three of the girls have him blocked. While we were trying to discuss one of the cold cases we’re invested in, he went from calling our theories stupid to referring to us by words which I am only comfortable repeating by their first letter, if you catch my drift. We went straight from the bathroom to sneaking out the back of the bar and calling it a night. He ruined everything. His name should be MoriButtholeJerkGuy.”

Malcolm’s frown deepened. “Let me see your phone.”

Puzzled but accommodating, she handed it over. He lowered himself to the mattress and scooted closer to press their heads together and aimed her camera down at them.

“Oh! This is a weird time for a photo shoot, but okay.” She put her glasses back on and smiled with him when the flash went off. Half blinded, he quickly opened a browser and started fiddling. “What’s happening? And do you want me to forward that to you? You know, just in case you ever get tired of your lock screen and can’t think of anything else to use…”

He smiled as he worked rapidly to do what he wanted to do. A few minutes later, he handed it back to her.

“There.”

She looked at the phone like it might slither out of her hand and uncoil into a snake. “What’s there?”

“I made a profile on Justice Quest with that picture of us. I’ve friend requested you and taken the liberty of accepting on your behalf. I hope that isn’t too forward. You say he’s my fanboy. Let’s see how he likes it to know that the brilliant, kind, dedicated, impressive doctor that he finds so threatening is dear to someone whose opinion he does value.”

She looked between him and the phone where his profile was on display, and the soft glow of the screen illuminated her slow-growing smile.

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“I did. I’ve had enough of that guy. And I blocked him on your account. I don’t want you having any further contact with him. His behavior isn’t normal, and I don’t trust it. Did he give you his real name at the bar?”

She shook her head, but he didn’t think it would be too hard to find. If he found out that she or any of the other women he harassed had more problems with him, he wanted to be ready to help them with restraining orders and planned to talk to Gil about what he thought should be done. It was tricky since most of the harassment was online. The law in that area was always changing and adapting with the times.

“Thanks, Bright.”

“Of course.”

She set the phone aside and pulled her glasses back off with a yawn hidden behind her hand.

“And no,” he added as an afterthought.

She rubbed her tired eyes and blinked sleepily at him, close enough to touch. But he didn’t.

“No what?”

A wicked gleam cut through the darkness at her as he answered her earlier question, “No, I’m not into group sex. I prefer to pursue relationships with one special person. Someone I can connect with. Someone who makes me laugh and I can trust. Someone smart that makes all the bad stuff seem far away when we’re alone. Someone good. It’s nice when that comes along, isn’t it?”

Edrisa locked eyes with him for a beat too long as she searched his gaze. A tiny, uncertain smile tilted her lips.

“I do like the sound of that,” she murmured, and Malcolm started to reach for her hand just as she rolled over onto her back with a heavy sigh. “I like the sound of sleep even more. Going twelve rounds with a crazy guy who stalks you online is exhausting. I think he was siphoning our souls. You should profile him as a demon.”

“Oh, I already have,” he said as he pulled his hand back before she saw how far he’d moved to touch her.

“See you in the morning.” She bounced the bed a little as she hopped up to head for the couch.

“Sweet dreams, Edrisa. You deserve them.” Even if Malcolm didn’t have those very often himself, he’d sleep easier knowing she hadn’t shaken off her crush just yet, hadn’t tried to move on with some random date, and wouldn’t be dealing with that MoriAnarchy jerk anymore. With him blocked from her account, he’d have to go through someone else to get to her, and Malcolm really hoped it was him he tried that with.

The man was a coward. He wouldn’t let him bother Edrisa again. He could do that for her. It was what a friend was for. And a friend plus.

****

Edrisa poked her head into the interrogation room and shook a folder while the rest of them were going over suspect information. Malcolm turned where he was standing at the case board and let himself adjust to the pang in his chest that both hurt and excited him at the sight of her. He’d never been as aware of the distance between his bed and the couch as he had last night after she’d left his side to go to sleep. The space grew a tether that caught his wrist in a cuff and tried to drag him closer. He’d rolled over and stared at the window until he’d fallen asleep. That cuff closed around him again as she stepped into the room, and it was a lot harder to resist the tug of it when she was only a couple of feet away.

“I have the file you wanted,” she said and handed the folder to Gil, waving to the other two sitting at the table.

“Hey, Edrisa,” Malcolm greeted.

She turned a giant smile on him. “Bright! I was actually going to come find you in a minute anyway. I wanted to ask you if you’d like to eat dinner together tonight.”

“Sure. Don’t we usually?” He’d grown quickly attached to the routine. He’d eaten more regular meals since she’d started staying with him than he had in months. Between the extra nutrition and her help with his nightmares, he was getting a real taste for that strange state of being known as good health.

“Yes. But I was thinking that tonight I would cook for you.”

“Oh. That’s a lovely offer.” They’d gone out to eat a couple of times but mostly ate takeout together. “I would enjoy that. Thank you. And I’ll help. I can pick anything up that we need on the way home.”

She raised her hands and waved them back and forth to ward him off. “No, no, no. This is all on me. And it will be good. My good to burned-to-a-crisp disaster ratio on dinners is… not great, but greatly improved! I’ll start early so I have time to scrap it and start over if the ratio tips back the wrong way.”

“Sounds like it would be easier if I helped.”

“Sounds like it would be easier ordering pizza,” JT muttered, and Dani tucked a smile away behind her hair.

“Probably,” Edrisa admitted, “but I want to make this my thank you for the couch and the company and for saving me from whatever lived in the walls at The Six. I’m not convinced it was a known species.”

Malcolm was pretty sure that what she sensed lurking at the peepholes in the walls at The Six was the well-documented species known as the Neighboring Pervert.

She shook herself. “Anyway. That’s why I was going to find you. My landlord called this morning. My apartment is fixed and ready. I can move out of your place.”

That pulled him up short. Disappointment slashed through him at the news.

“That’s great,” he said with a stab of guilt that he couldn’t muster any actual enthusiasm. It obviously was a good thing, and it wasn’t realistic or sustainable for her to live with him forever. She had to leave eventually. It was good. “I’m glad.”

She opened her mouth but held back whatever words tried to come out and nodded at him with an agreeable smile instead. “Yep. So. Tonight?”

“Tonight,” he agreed.

“Goodbye, Bright. Goodbye, everyone else,” she said and bounded back out.

Malcolm watched her go, gaze lingering on the empty doorway after her. The invisible tether between them only tightened, knowing that she would be leaving his apartment soon too, only this time the cuff felt somewhere closer to his heart, and the tug when it squeezed was harder to ignore.

JT shared a look with Dani and Gil. “She does know that the world doesn’t consist of Bright and ‘everyone else’, right?”

Malcolm turned and caught Gil staring at him. From the scrutiny in his gaze, he wasn’t surprised when he asked him to hang back after telling the others where to go next for the case. He took the seat across from where he was sitting at the table. He already knew where this was going. Gil warned him to be careful with Edrisa’s feelings when he found out she was staying with him and with good reason. It wasn’t fair to toy with someone who had feelings for you when you didn’t return them, but that was never his intention and he’d certainly never do anything to hurt her, then or now.

“Look, I know what you’re going to—”

“What are you waiting for, kid?” Gil asked, and Malcolm looked up at him in surprise. Okay. Maybe he didn’t know what this was about.

“Pardon?”

Gil’s eyes flicked to the ceiling in exasperation. “You and Edrisa. Would you call that unrequited?”

Malcolm knew the difference between wanting something he couldn’t have and being too afraid to take something that he could. “. . . I wouldn’t say _un_.”

Gil watched him a moment in that way he had that was so unlike the way his father looked at him. Dr. Whitly’s gaze cut into him with a scalpel. Gil watched him with a calming hand. A slow smile altered his thoughtful expression.

He stood up and rounded the table, smacking Malcolm lightly on the head with the folder Edrisa had given him. “Go get the girl, Bright.”

Malcolm shook his surprise enough to catch him before he made it out the door. “Wait! That’s the extent of your advice? Aren’t you supposed to bestow your wisdom in longer and more specific doses?”

“Kid, you make everything more complicated than it is. Let this one thing in your life be easy.” Gil gave him a pointed stare. “Get. The. Girl.”

He tapped the doorway and left. Simple. Easy. Malcolm could do easy.

How hard could it be?

****

He called her when he wrapped up work for the day and walked out of the precinct. There was still plenty of daylight left. He figured he had time to go home and shower before he left to have dinner at her place. She picked up on the third ring.

_“Hello, Mr. Bright.”_

He paused and glanced down at the phone, but goofy was kind of Edrisa’s default so he didn’t think much of it.

“Uh. Hey, Edrisa. I’m headed over soon. Are you sure there isn’t anything I can pick up for dinner?”

He didn’t want to show up empty-handed, especially since he was planning on approaching the subject of their friendship and his interest in pursuing other avenues with her. His mother said there was nothing less romantic than a man who brought a screw cap to dinner. He had an unopened bottle of Dom Perignon he could bring if nothing else. Edrisa got rosy-cheeked and silly after only a couple glasses. It was his favorite part of dinner.

_“Maybe some flowers?”_

He stopped beside a pretzel vendor and looked up with a slow smile. This was precisely the track he was trying to get on. “Sure. I can get you flowers.”

_“Great. Can you get my favorite? Roses, remember? Thanks.”_ She hung up before he could respond, and his happy anticipation for the night hit a wall. She was upbeat and normal, but it wasn’t how she said it, it was what she said.

His smile melted through confusion and quickly fell away altogether. He was back on the phone in seconds, and he started off in a hurry. No time to go home and shower after all.

_“What’s going on, Bright?”_ Gil asked when he picked up.

“I need you at Edrisa’s apartment. I think the guy who’s been harassing her online just escalated. He has her.”

And it was his fault for triggering him on Justice Quest by elevating Edrisa’s status in his eyes with her association with a profiler he respected. Someone with his conflicting superiority and inferiority complexes would have found it unbearable to see someone he deemed important valuing someone he felt jealous hatred towards.

Malcolm spent his free time that morning liking Edrisa’s posts and replying with compliments, being as visible to someone stalking her online presence as possible. MoriAnarchy would have felt entitled and betrayed, only instead of acting out with more online abuse that they could have used in a formal complaint about him, he’d taken it to the next level. He should have predicted this. It was his job to predict this.

“This guy won’t hesitate to become violent. His behavior escalated too quickly. He’s looking for release. He believes that the feeling of disappointment with his lack of accomplishment in life can be erased if he pushes down someone who has what he wants: an education, a respectable job, social status. He thinks hurting Edrisa will show his dominance.”

_“Kid, be smart. Stay level and wait for backup. We’re on our way.”_

Car horns honked and shouts followed him as he crossed the road at a run without looking. He was glad the others were on their way. But he’d get there first.

****

The door cracked open after he knocked, which was good. He was worried MoriAnarchy wouldn’t let her answer it. Then he would have had to figure something out with the fire escape, and she was five floors up. His rescue plan could have fallen on its head faster than he did.

“Oh. Hello, Mr. Bright,” she said, still trying to signal to him that something was wrong. Her gaze swept past him to the empty hallway and the lack of immediate backup, and alarm flashed in her eyes.

That was okay. He had a plan to keep her calm and let her know that help was on the way. More help than he could provide anyway, the kind with badges and handcuffs and guns. A gun would have been really handy right then.

“They didn’t have any roses, can you believe that? I brought you this instead.” He raised a single daisy that he’d plucked from a display stand on his race to her apartment. “Sorry. I know you don’t care much for daisies.”

At the sight of her actual favorite flower, she opened the door wider, shoulders slumping and face relaxing in obvious relief. “That’s alright.” She took it reverently by the stem. “This is perfect. Thank God for this daisy.”

“May I come in?” he asked before she could blow their element of surprise and tip MoriAnarchy off.

“Of course. Yes.”

He raised his hand in the universal sign for a gun and raised his eyebrows questioningly. She gave a tiny, almost indiscernible nod and was careful when she stepped back to allow him in. The gun must have been pointed at her. He was close. Very close. Hidden behind the door close. Malcolm braced himself for the confrontation.

He wasn’t a ninja but he did know his way around human anatomy and a Jiu-Jitsu gym, which was why he’d hoped to make a more impressive entrance as he stepped into the apartment and curled backward rapidly to disarm and disable the intruder. Life didn’t follow blueprints very well, and his plans fell short as MoriAnarchy dodged, knocked him back, and landed a hit to the back of his head with the grip of his gun. Malcolm lurched forward at the impact and landed on his hands and knees on the floor with a grunt and a thud.

“Okay,” he groaned. He was still winded from the run to the apartment but panted more from the pain of the blow than the exertion of the race over. His head throbbed where he’d been hit. “That wasn’t as badass as I’d hoped.”

Edrisa was quick to soothe his bruised ego. “I thought it was very heroic. A for effort.”

“Thank you.”

“Shut up!”

Malcolm swung his attention up to the man shouting at them. MoriAnarchy was tall and built like someone who thrived on protein shakes and squats at the gym. A hand-to-hand fight was not in his best interest, so when he swung the gun back up at them, Malcolm switched from offense to defense and clambered to his feet to shove himself in front of Edrisa with his arms up and out.

“It’s okay. Hey, everything is okay.”

The gun was aimed square at his chest.

“Bright…”

He felt Edrisa’s hands, nervous and light, against his back.

“It’s all right,” he told her in a calm voice, focus steady on the gun and the man towering over them. “MoriAnarchy, right? I’m Malcolm Bright. But you knew that already. I hear you’ve been following my work. I’m flattered. Edrisa showed me the true crime community on Justice Quest, and your posts are by far the most insightful. I’ve been a profiler in the FBI and work as a consultant for the NYPD, and I’ve never come across someone with such an astute understanding of the psychology of killers. Are you in law enforcement?”

Not a chance. No way someone with his level of narcissism and problems with rage would pass the psych evaluations required to enter on the federal or local level. That didn’t matter. He just needed to stroke his ego long enough to lower his defenses so he could get another chance to move in without getting shot.

“He works as a stenographer at the courthouse,” Edrisa offered at his back. “His name is Morgan Kelly. One of the women from the Justice Quest meetup found him on Facebook. She messaged all of us the info as a heads up. He introduced himself as a lawyer.” She peeked out from behind Bright. “Because he is a liar.”

Morgan’s eyes flashed and Malcolm’s widened as he quickly sidestepped to shield her from view again.

“I get it!” Malcolm pacified him. “You didn’t owe those women the truth. Men like you and me don’t owe women anything, right? They take and take and take and expect us to give until we’re drained dry. Then they get all the credit for our work.”

“That’s a dick thing to say,” Edrisa said. He glanced back at her with a pointed look, and realization came over her at what he was doing. “Um, but I’m… so lowly… that who even cares what I think?”

It was better to roll with it, so Malcolm fought his internal cringe and nodded back at Morgan whose stare darted between him and trying to see Edrisa.

“It can wear a man down,” Malcolm continued. “That’s why I friended Edrisa on Justice Quest. She nagged and nagged about it when the only posts on there worth reading were yours, Morgan. I decided against friending you. I figured someone with your observational skills wouldn’t bother accepting a friend request from someone like me.”

Light came up in Morgan Kelly’s eyes in the repositioning of himself over Malcolm in social status. That was good.

“It isn’t fair,” he said at last.

“It never is,” Malcolm agreed. “Working in the courthouse, you must see lawyers and policemen and experts testify every day, but none of them understand the cases the way you do. You figure it all out online and never get any of the credit. It isn’t fair.”

“It isn’t.” Morgan shook his head, and the gun lowered down, down, to the floor. “Why should Tanaka get all the credit?”

Edrisa was stiff and silent where he shielded her.

Malcolm answered calmly, “Because Edrisa is a brilliant doctor and a good person. Better than me and much better than you.”

Morgan’s eyes snapped up, but Malcolm was too quick. This time his Jiu-Jitsu training paid off. He moved in, thrust up his open palm, and broke Morgan’s nose before he had time to lift the gun. He twisted his wrist, stole the gun when his grip loosened with a cry, and wrenched him to the floor in one fluid movement. He aimed it down at him where he cowered on the floor with his hand over his face, hollering.

Edrisa skipped over to Malcolm’s side with a blinding smile, clutching the daisy to her chest in both hands.

“Ha!” She bounced in her spot and smiled victoriously over MoriAnarchy. “He didn’t mean any of that stuff.” She craned her neck up at Malcolm and squinted at him behind her glasses. “You—You didn’t mean any of that stuff… right?”

“Not a word. Except the last part. That part, I meant.”

“Oh.” She melted beside him and hugged the daisy. “That’s okay. And lovely.”

“Lovely and true.”

MoriAnarchy frowned up at them, nursing his broken nose, but Malcolm was in good spirits now that Edrisa was safe. He kept the gun trained on him but nodded at the flower she held.

“I did not have time to pay for that,” he informed her. “I snatched it as I ran. I need to find that vendor.”

“You stole a flower for me?” she asked in awe like he’d just confessed to knowing magic. It was amazing how little it took for her to feel appreciated. He planned to raise her standards for that by treating her the way she didn’t realize she deserved.

“Edrisa, I would have stolen a tennis bracelet made of diamond daisies for you if it had been on display and within reach on my way here.”

Her smile was soft and touched something warm inside his chest, but she held the flower like it was worth that and more.

Gil and JT busted in behind them, and he was happy to relinquish the gun and slink to the sidelines while they dealt with the man who was neither mannered nor cunning enough to take Moriarty’s name even by half. His gaze settled on Edrisa as she animatedly recounted Malcolm’s alleged heroics to Gil in great (exaggerated) detail while JT handcuffed Morgan Kelly. He tucked his hands in his pockets and wandered over, happy despite the pounding in the back of his head from the hit he took, that DocHolmes was finally free of MoriAnarchy.

****

Malcolm didn’t need an escort home, but he didn’t object to Edrisa coming back to his apartment with him under the guise of picking up the rest of her stuff. He knew she wasn’t happy that he refused to go to the hospital to get his head checked out where he’d been hit with the gun. It wasn’t even bleeding, and the aspirin she’d given him before they both went down to the station to give their statements had knocked out the headache. He was fine. If monitoring him gave her a reason to stay at his place one more night, all the better. Even if she was probably missing sleeping in her bed. He was going to feel the loss when she wasn’t around anymore.

He’d liked coming home and finding her on his couch watching TV in a pair of shorts and a sweater. It was nice having someone that forced him to prioritize regular meals and even better that she was never dull company. Edrisa always had something interesting to share or was eager to hear how his day was. Talking cases out with her in the evenings over wine and leftovers with something funny on TV was better for working things out than the case board. It was nice having someone there waiting for him or someone to look forward to greeting if he beat her home.

He was going to miss her.

It must have shown on his face in a gaze he hadn’t meant to linger because they hadn’t let themselves into his apartment a full minute before Edrisa hesitated in confusion.

“What?” She looked down at herself, checking for something out of place. She held the daisy loosely in one hand at her side. Malcolm felt a surge of confidence at the sight of her gentle care.

“You should put that in water,” he suggested without answering, and she spun around for the kitchen. He trailed after.

He liked seeing the easy way she opened a cabinet and knew exactly where a slender fitting vase would be, liked her putting water in it at the sink, and setting the daisy with an appreciative eye on the counter. Ainsley wasn’t wrong when she told their father that trauma had messed him up. It also made him miss out on a lot. He’d had girlfriends, but he didn’t sleep with them in the technical sense. He couldn’t cohabitate with a woman without fear of his night terrors scaring or hurting her, couldn’t wake up next to someone every day, and didn’t know what it was like to bump into someone while sharing the sink to brush their teeth or play rock, paper, scissors for who picked the movie or washed the dishes. Edrisa staying with him gave him a taste for the simple things in life that had been denied to him. A normal life. With a normal woman. Happy. It was perfectly ordinary, and that was why it felt so special.

“You should stay the night,” he said. The words came without much thought, but it made sense and, crucially, he wanted it. Ainsley told him it was okay for him to want things. He was working on believing that.

Edrisa leaned back against the counter and tilted her head with a doubtful glance around the apartment. “I don’t have much stuff here. I can get it all together and get out of your hair in an hour.”

The island was between them, and he leaned over it. “I like you in my hair. And besides, the lock on your door needs to be fixed where Kelly broke into your apartment. You still have the chain, but after today, do you really want to risk it? It isn’t safe.”

Her shoulders sagged at the reminder of the repair needed the very day the previous repairs were finished. “My landlord hates me. I have a feeling I’ll need to start apartment hunting despite the large chunk of change I just invested to avoid that scenario.”

“Well. If he’s fool enough to evict you after you were victimized in a building he’s responsible for securing, you’re always welcome to come back here to browse Zumper.” He raised a hand at her narrowed eyes. “It sounds like a hookup app, but it’s for apartment hunting, I swear.”

“Probably for the best.” Edrisa pushed off the counter and walked around over to his side of the island, leaning on the opposite end from him. “I never do well with those dating apps. Met some real weirdos swiping right a few times, but mostly I get the feeling that I’m the weirdo. On a totally unrelated note, I suggest not bringing up dismembered bodies on the first date. Apparently, it’s a subject that isn’t well-received by prospective suitors.”

“I learned that one in college,” Malcolm told her. “But heads up, the dismembered bodies chat falls flat on dates two through three too. Full disclosure, it might land beautifully on a fourth, but I rarely make it to one.”

Edrisa’s smile was contagious. “That’s so funny because the first time we had dinner together, that’s pretty much all we talked about, and I had an awesome time. Even better than that cuddle party I went to, and that was a good time.” Her eyes widened. “Not that our dinner that night was a date! Or any of our dinners. We’re buddies. Good buddies! Great even. Pals who eat lots of food together”—she raised a finger and an eyebrow—“platonically.”

His eyes softened on her, and the warmth that spread in his chest—born from amusement and bleeding into affection—tugged his lips into a slow, lopsided smile.

“Is that so?”

“Uh-huh. And I’m totally cool with that,” she assured him. “You and me. Us. The non-us. Just two friendly buddy people. What’s not to like? Friendship has couches and parakeets and lollipops. I couldn’t ask for anything more. What even _is_ more, you know?”

She gave an exaggerated shrug of flippancy, and he took a step towards her. “What about love?”

Alarm flashed through her eyes, and she was quick to blow that off. “Pfft. Who needs it? Gross.”

“Companionship?” Another step.

Her eyes tracked his movement, but she lifted a shoulder with a dismissive grin and shake of her head. “Friends have that.”

He stopped right in front of her, and she tilted her head back to peer up at him as he felt the spark she lit in him glow warmly in his expression.

His voice dropped, and he searched her face, his heart kicking up in warning to hold back, stop, retreat. He fought with himself and stayed steady beside her. He could want things for himself. He swallowed and when he spoke, he wasn’t sure if he was still teasing or asking or doubting. He only knew that he had to creep closer to the edge of the abyss between them and hope that she met him halfway.

“Sex?” he asked on a whisper.

Edrisa swallowed, and the fear that jumped behind her eyes almost made him step back. But he didn’t. It was okay. It was.

They were.

“Sure,” she answered and had to stop and clear her throat to go on. “I mean, if that’s… you know… if a person were to prioritize that over other stuff, then yeah, I suppose a lover would be preferable to a friend. But that’s not me! I’m totally, _totally_ happy being the friend girl. To you. And whoever. It’s like, sex, who even cares?” She laughed nervously. “In case you were wondering because I’m not a hundred percent sure what’s happening, but I think you’re wondering. But you have nothing to worry about. I am friend girl. That’s me, your friendly neighborhood pal buddy. I’m not pushing for—I mean, I value our friendship a lot and wouldn’t want you to—You don’t even have to think of me as a woman, honestly. I could be like a guy to you.”

She closed her eyes and cringed, and her nervousness calmed his own. It was just Edrisa. He knew her. She knew him. And they were safe with each other.

She looked up at him. “I just mean that I’m okay being just friends with you.”

Her eyes were hopeful and unsure, worried that she’d stepped over some line and upset him. Pretty and sweet. Like light. He wondered how he’d ever looked at Edrisa and not seen her.

He saw her now.

“I’m not,” he replied softly.

Her hair was light against his fingertips as he brushed it back from her face. His eyes flicked to her lips, and he leaned in, down, traced the line of her cheek to tilt her chin up and—

“Bright!”

Edrisa jumped back like he’d held a match to her skin, and he flinched. She froze where she’d balked and her eyes abruptly narrowed, became sharp as she regarded him like one of the slides she slipped under her microscope in her lab. He didn’t know what to do, so he did nothing. His eyes slid to the side as he waited, but he didn’t have to wait long. Edrisa’s posture abruptly relaxed, and she snatched up one of his hands in hers and led him at a hurried trot to his bed.

Bewildered, he could only follow.

“Uh, are you— Is this…”

This was bossier than he expected, but okay. He could roll with it. He was open to new things, and getting down to it was fine with him. Edrisa shoved him down to sit on the edge of the bed, but she was already twisting away and hurrying off as he reached out for her.

“Where are you—”

She dug around in the purse she’d hung on the coatrack by the door and came back with a penlight and a stethoscope. Props?

He wanted to hit pause, but he wasn’t sure how to slip away and call someone normal for tips on whether this was going well or very… not. He couldn’t tell, and there was a scary kind of intensity in her eyes as she stalked back, kind of like the way she looked when he caught her concentrating on work she brought home with her in the evenings or when he’d walked into the morgue before she noticed he was there. He didn’t know who he would call, though. An awkward phone call about a possible misstep in his sex life left his mother and Ainsley out. He had to assert boundaries somewhere. Gil would probably tell him to stop overthinking, and something felt off about asking Gil to think of Edrisa in a sexual context. Maybe JT? He was good at being normal and calling Malcolm out when he was being the opposite, which was often.

Edrisa was back in front of him, and he blinked back at the sudden blast of light she shot into his face as she leaned forward and squinted closely at each of his eyes. Even without JT, he could tell this was weird and not at all going the way he hoped it would.

“How bad does your head still hurt?” she asked. “Are you experiencing blurred or double vision?”

“I—What?”

She spoke more to herself as she thought, “I haven’t noticed you have any trouble walking or struggling with balance problems on the way up. Are you dizzy at all?”

Then he understood. And it was a relief. Partly because he didn’t have to worry about coping with role-play that he wasn’t prepared for but mostly because he knew what was going on and how to handle it.

“You think I’m concussed,” he concluded. Good. He hadn’t even needed a lifeline to figure it out.

Her suspicion mounted, and he blinked against the second pass of light across his eyes. “You’re being too slow to answer any of my questions. This is a bad sign. We should get you to the hospital.”

He tried to calm her worries. “I don’t have a concussion.”

The hit he took hadn’t been that hard.

She laughed at the wall and nodded her head in disagreement. “You almost kissed me. You’re confused and saying things that don’t make sense. That’s concussion 101.”

That was the thing, though, wasn’t it? It only took a broken elevator, a flooded apartment, and the fear of losing her to a crazed online stalker for him to see it. He reached up and gently lowered the hand with the penlight, holding it between both of his.

He gazed up at her and felt the stress of the day melt out of him, the stress of confession and her reaction fall away, until all that was left was certainty because he knew and meant this.

“Edrisa.” He called her attention back to him and waited until she met his eyes before he promised, “We do make sense.”

She stopped mentally running through symptoms and turned real focus on him, at the openness he offered her. Her look was still critical, but there was hesitation in it too now. She was listening. That was something.

“You’ve liked me for a while,” he said, not meaning to embarrass her but trying to get at what he wanted her to see too.

He’d indulged her crush, never minded it, hadn’t done anything to encourage or discourage it, but he’d known it was there. He’d gotten comfortable with it. In retrospect, he wondered if he hadn’t been comforted by it. He could trust Edrisa to care about him, to look at him like he was special, to believe for whatever reason that he was. He’d taken that interest for granted. He wasn’t going to do that anymore. He took the penlight from her, clicked it off, and set it aside to take her hand in his without anything between them.

“I’m trying to tell you that I’m there. With you. I see you, Edrisa. And yes”—he smiled—“I did attempt to kiss you and would very much like to make a second attempt if you are amenable to that.”

The change that came over her was the difference between a dark subway tunnel and the rising of the sun. He felt the warmth in her joy like daylight on his skin.

“I think you’ll get different results this time in this kissing experiment of yours,” she told him. “That’s the beauty of science, really. You never can predict what will happen. Trial and error.”

No more errors.

Malcolm pulled her to him, cupped the back of her head and brought her mouth to his. The first press of his lips to hers pushed his heart into a happy clip. Her lips parted with a gasp of surprise or pleasure, and he deepened the kiss as one of her hands found his shoulder with a bracing squeeze. He’d realized his feelings and had her within days, but it was different for Edrisa. She’d wanted him all along.

He caught her along the waist as her knees weakened under the insistent press of his lips on hers, moving with want that she’d had to wait for. Her hand found his face as he released hers and with a tight grip on her hips, picked her up and onto his lap, pulling her down against him. He was breathless and watchful as they broke apart and saw the excitement and trepidation all mixed up behind her eyes as she reached for what she wanted and he let her have it.

Wanting her. Being wanted. He could take and give, and they would be all right. They could have this.

Malcolm rolled them over onto the center of the bed. He hovered over her, looking down and watching the trepidation recede behind a soft, easy joy that rose in her eyes as she gazed back at him. A kindness. Happy and open. There all along.

Malcolm’s kiss was slower, more of a mark on her mouth than a press, his lips moving against hers like a pen in his hand writing his name on her over and over again. Her hands came to his waist just as claiming, and he dropped his forehead to hers as she gripped, hard, each rough press of her fingers a reply to his body hot against hers. He read the response in the heat against her skin as his hands trailed over her arms: he could be happy. He could.

She was beautiful, weird, and weirdly perfect. For him. And it could be so…. If he was careful, if he let go and wanted and tried, if he could fold back the past and live here, right now, with her and the big heart where she’d safely placed him…. If he just—

“Are you here?” Edrisa whispered, feeling his worries wander or finding her own at the conflict he projected. Dusk broke in pretty shadows over the bed as the sun sank lower and rested them inside a soft half-light. It was easier to keep the past at bay when he could anchor himself to her searching eyes.

“I’m here,” he promised. It took him a while and he was a work in progress, but he wanted her, wanted this.

She was small and guileless underneath him. His chest ached with sudden awful relief at the thought of her alone with that man in her apartment, sending him clues that something was wrong over the phone and hoping he’d come, that he’d save her. He had, but it was close. Too close. She read his mind as he brushed her hair back.

“Heck of a day,” she murmured.

And it wasn’t over yet. Malcolm pulled her glasses off and carefully set them aside, taking a moment to kiss each of the eyelids that he rarely saw uncovered. He felt a kick in the chest at her flushed and watching him with a look so sweetly trusting that his heart gave a warning tumble as he gazed back at her. He watched her watching him, thinking of the girl in the morgue who took to him immediately who turned into the friend he could count on for a laugh and became the woman that forced light into the dark corners of his life.

For a while, the room spun in a happy, dozing way, but the spinning was inside his racing heart and the part of his mind that was shocked to find himself in a place he actually wanted to be with a person who wanted him back. A person who wouldn’t peter out after three dates. A person he could keep. For once, he didn’t try to drag himself to a stop while he came undone. He could trust her to keep him steady while he wasn’t. He trusted Edrisa to stay.

She had one leg wrapped around him and her fingers on the side of his face, feather light but there. With him. Under him. Not going anywhere. He leaned in, and his smile on her parted lips felt twenty years late. Free in a way he never was. Hopeful in a way he never dared.

“Pretty good day,” he decided.

“Except for almost dying.”

“Except for that,” he agreed and kissed her quiet.

Much later, he fell asleep with one cuffed arm snug around Edrisa’s waist. She woke him up fifteen minutes before his night terrors typically started, and with that anticipatory awakening, it was her warmth on him and good dreams that carried him to a new day.

****

Malcolm held the elevator at the precinct as someone rushed for it on his way to meet the team about a case, and he smiled as Edrisa ducked inside. Recognition switched to a shy, knowing smile as she moved to stand in the back with him, alone in the elevator.

“Hey there.” Her hand found his, and she smiled up at him as she held it, her shoulders swaying at his side. “I can do that now.”

“Yes, you can,” he said, and it was a smooth ride up to the next floor.

“Bet I solve this murder before you,” she challenged. “Profiling is nice and all, but”—she pointed her free thumb at herself—“I’ve got mad skills. And body parts.”

If there was a more romantic pastime than competitive homicide solving, he didn’t know what it was. 

“You’re on.”

They grinned at each other, and the elevator doors slid open. They retracted their hands and put their professional game faces on as they stepped out into the station, ready to take on the next case—together.


End file.
